


The Lost Mage

by Deejaymil



Category: PIERCE Tamora - Works, Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Romance, Character Death, Daine never came to Tortall after her family died, Found Family, Friendship, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Loneliness, Magic, Mild Sexual Content, Mind Manipulation, Multi, No age gap, Poor Numair thinks he's the hero of this story, Queer Themes, Rebellion, Series: The Immortals (Tamora Pierce), Shapeshifting, Slavery, Slow Build, Violence, War, bi!Numair invades Galla, sorry Galla, we salute all the characters that aren't going to make it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-19
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:21:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 44
Words: 295,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24270499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: Driven out of Tortall by madness and magic, Numair Salmalín finds himself seeking sanctuary within the tempestuous walls of the Gallan capital. Here, unrest boils below the illusionary calm of a country at peace: an unpopular king acts to outlaw the use of magic; a rebel mage and her patchwork assassin raise the people against their palace; and invidious hands work to manipulate the people into fighting each other instead of the forces that threaten them.Numair, ordered by his king to prevent the aftershock of Galla falling from claiming Tortall as well, finds that not even the greatest of mages is enough to stop the inevitable detonation of a starving city. With only the unstable wild mage, Veralidaine Sarrasri, and the duplicitous Savigny de Hartholm, the left hand of the king, to help him save Galla’s people, Numair is forced to take a side in a war he wants no part of.Galla will burn. Numair cannot stop it.And a figure from his past is determined to ensure that Numair burns too.
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s), Numair Salmalín/Veralidaine Sarrasri
Comments: 676
Kudos: 171





	1. The State of Being Limestone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **PART I: FROM BADGER TO BELTANE**
> 
> Andrej thought about it - the notion that the world was riddled with holes where certain people and animals were meant to be, but weren’t.
> 
> **– Sonya Hartnett, _The Midnight Zoo_**

It was a terrible thing, considered Numair Salmalín, that for a man with as much raw power as he, his last thought was not going to be ‘How do I not die?’ but instead the rather uninspiring ‘I hope Alanna doesn’t find out about this’. Death was something he’d thought about at length, after all. A rather academic exercise. Alanna’s scorn when she found out just how easy he’d gone down? Unthinkable.

That was his last coherent thought before the drugs kicked in.

Escape under the influence of what the lord of Sinthya had fed him was a cacophony of images and understandings that intersected brilliantly across his consciousness and left him reeling across an uneven sky, distantly aware that he was minutes from the Stormwings’ claws. They chased him without pause. He’d flap his wings above a grassy hill, striving for distance, for height, for sanity, and then he’d blink and find that he was tumbling towards a stony river. Sometimes he was back in Carthak and the Ozorne of their university days was chasing him with a wicker basket and begging him to stop biting and just get in. Then Ozorne would vanish and leave Master Cosmas in his place, setting the sky on fire and explaining the burning in every part of Numair’s body and soul. 

No matter what Numair hallucinated – as he knew he was hallucinating, under the sickening terror of losing his mind – the Stormwings still chased him, their scent in his nostrils and the clatter of their wings narrating his flight. He flew as hard as his disjointed hawk shape would allow, straight on through the pain of a metal talon catching his wing. He was determined to ensure Alanna would have no reason to believe he had failed. Death would truly be preferable to that.

Though he wouldn’t be aware of this until later, Numair was in the process of becoming lost. Instead of heading south-west towards Alanna, he was pushed north by a great, snarling badger that dug its way across the sky with terrible silver claws. The badger drove him under the screams of the infuriated Stormwings, into Galla and out of his allies’ reach.

Though Alanna and the men of the King’s Own would wait for his return from Sinthya, they would eventually leave without him.

When Numair woke, he didn’t know where he was, or who he was, or what. All he knew was that it was hot and he was slimy and stiffening. The dark was all around. Though he tried to fight his way out of whatever was pinning his limbs to his body, it held resolute. A vice, he decided, drifting half-way out of his mind. He was in a vice, being crushed. What would he be at the end of this process?

This was an unsatisfying thought to follow through, as it required him to know what he was currently. Limestone, when subjected to great heat and pressure, became marble, sometimes. He doubted he was limestone. Certainly, his end seemed like it would be much messier.

Time passed like that.

There was a brief period between pondering the state of being limestone and the fever sinking in when he was cognizant that he, Numair – or was it Arram? – was many things. Aware of himself, for one. A human – usually – was another, though right now he was monumentally stuck as a hawk. Sobering up was the last, though not enough to free his muddled-up magic and not quick enough to figure out what had gone wrong. It was enough that he could struggle his way upright, recognising that the vice around him was ragged brick, the slime below was rain run-off pooling into a depression in the wall he was crammed into, and that his wing was broken. Then the fever hit and that cognizance fled, leaving behind only the notion that the errors he’d made in Sinthya were certainly going to be his last.

Then there was pain. Numair woke with a screech, battering with his non-broken wing at the hands that held him. Whoever he was slapping at wasn’t put off by his ferocity either, continuing to drag him out of the crack he’d wedged himself into. They had no sympathy for his poor broken wing or his battered head. Perhaps the Stormwings, he thought – but had he hallucinated them along with Ozorne?

The light of day combined with the sudden influx of noise – pigs, cart wheels on cobbled stone, a dog screaming with excitement overhead, a man’s deep voice speaking accented Common – was too much. Numair stopped struggling, going limp and letting the fever take him. Maybe this was how the Black God took those who were foolish enough to die as he had. If so, there was no fighting it and he shouldn’t be blasphemous enough to try.

_Do as you wish, my lord,_ he thought in the direction of the hands now lifting him into the air, large enough hands to easily pin Numair’s wings against his body. _What am I but an addle-brained mage, deserving of my fate?_

A flicker of attention turned his way at that, like noticing strange magic out the corner of one’s eye, though this was in his mind not his vision. There was a firm feeling of existence in the physical plane, of actual spatial orientation. Numair tried to twist to look towards it but it was gone, and so was he.

The Peaceful Realms were strange. Numair drifted in and out of them between spending time back at the palace with Alanna and Gareth, who scolded him for having the audacity to vanish. He was always sorry when they faded. It didn’t hurt as much when they were around. 

There were those large hands, always, poking at his wings and his beak. Several times, Numair thought that those hands were trying to feed him, but what was offered had no taste or consistency of any food he’d ever come across even if he could have tolerated swallowing. He turned his beak, suddenly certain that he’d never escaped Sinthya and the lord was still trying to drug him silly. It was working. Numair had never felt sillier.

“If you don’t eat, you’re going to die, strange bird,” said the owner of the hands.

Numair didn’t answer; he was busy being smothered by the weight of his overheated feathers. He didn’t answer the new voice either, which was masculine too but softer, younger:

“Maybe Daine …?”

The owner of the hands said, “Maybe.”

The voices left Numair alone. He dozed in a world made of high walls and distant flames. Alanna wanted to know where he’d gone wrong. He told her that wasn’t important: she needed to tell the king about treason. She replied, “How can I? You never came home to warn us.”

Numair said, “Oh …”

When Alanna faded again and Numair returned to his waking misery, he found that the Peaceful Realms as he’d come to know them – a cavernous space, silky surfaces, and the promise of eternal warmth – had changed again. Cold bit at his feathers and he opened his eyes, finding a rare clarity as he looked around. He was in a basket made of woven wicker, being carried. Sunlight peeked through gaps in the weaving, but a chill white sunlight. The air had the frigid quality of early spring in the mountains, lashed with rain and thin to breathe.

A fever, Numair realised. He was delirious. That was why everything had been so strange, but the cold air was briefly rousing him. He might not be this clear again, before …

There was treason in Tortall. He had to get a message to Alanna, to Jon.

He turned his attention to the one holding the basket, who was invisible to Numair trapped within the wicker depths. His voice was audible though, and Numair listened intently.

“But you’ll tell me if you see her?” the man with the basket was saying to another. “There’ll be gold in it for you.”

“It’s a bad omen, m’lord, looking for witches.”

“Well, I’m inviting them. Tell your companions – I want _this_ witch. Understand?”

There was a murmured assent.

Gallan, Numair ascertained. Those accents were Gallan, the one who carried him with the polished pronunciation of a noble. An ally? Numair didn’t know. Galla hadn’t been a concern of Tortall in the time that Numair had been working for the Shadow Service. He hadn’t been assigned anything to do with it, so he’d never taken the time to learn more than the basics.

The lid of the basket opened and Numair hissed at the sharp sunlight, only looking up when a face loomed overhead and blocked it from his aching head. Outlined by the light, it was impossible to make out details of the face that examined him. Try as he might, Numair couldn’t work the intricacies of his shapeshifting spell, not to undo it, not to speak, and especially not to turn back and beg this man to pass on a message. It all evaded him. His magic was as muddled as he was. There was no imploring his saviour to help.

“How does one find someone determined to remain hidden?” the man asked Numair, who blinked. Was that a rhetorical question? Did he want an answer? It seemed obvious the answer wouldn’t be ‘by asking a bird’.

I don’t think much of your rescuing skills, Numair thought uncharitably of the man.

The basket lid closed. They were still for a while before the even rhythm of being carried returned, surrounding them with the noise of the streets they were travelling through and the clatter of hooves alongside. Numair tried to stay awake to hear as much as possible about what kind of witch they were seeking and what help he was to expect, but, as night fell around them and the air grew damp, he knew the fever was rising again. They’d been searching all day. Perhaps Numair had been unkind, doubting this man’s charity. He was dedicated, at least.

Numair slept. His dreams were scattered and uneasy.

_“I don’t think much of human mages if you can’t even get out of a simple bird shape and heal before you die,” snapped the badger that had chased him. Numair looked around. He was human again and in a great badger sett, propped against the wall. “I need you. When are you going to stop being silly and do as I ask?”_

_“I don’t remember you asking me to do anything,” said Numair mildly, “let alone you asking me to do something and I deciding, unwisely, to disregard you.”_

_The badger looked at him, muzzle curled._

_“Great One,” Numair added, giving an awkward, half-sitting, half-leaning bow._

_The badger snorted. “So you know your gods then, mage. I’m not impressed. What would impress me is you using the magic you were for some reason gifted and getting to the girl!”_

_Numair had gotten distracted studying the dirt wall he was against. Even in the dream, he was weak. His breath was short and spots flickered in front of his eyes, indicating a lack of air being circulated through his body. Despite this, he dearly wanted to know – was this dream dirt? Godly dirt? Was the god of earthworms here too, spending time with the god of cantankerous badger kin? He had so many questions._

_He blinked._

_“Girl?” he asked dumbly._

_“Yes, girl. I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on her.”_

_“And you’ve lost her?” asked Numair. “Well done.”_

_The badger’s eyes narrowed._

_“I look and she’s a squirmy kit, useless and small,” the badger muttered, “then I look again and she’s gone. Home burned, family in the ground. When I look for her mind, there’s a wall. Something is blocking me from finding my girl, rude mage. That something will not block you. When you find her, I will find you.”_

_“And if I don’t find her?” Numair asked. “I don’t want to continue perpetuating this idea you have of me as a discourteous lout, but even you must have noticed that I’ve got one foot in the Peaceful Realms. And, as you so kindly pointed out, I don’t know **how** to work my magic like this. I’m stuck. If you want me to find this girl, I need help.”_

_The badger snarled, lurching towards Numair. Numair, remembering with a strangled grin the alarming gods of his Carthakian youth, managed not to flinch back into the godly dirt behind him._

_“I am helping you!” roared the badger. Numair stayed very still. If he was silly enough to anger a god, even a lesser one, then being shouted at was the nicest outcome. “Find the girl! She’ll save your ridiculous life and, in turn, make sure she’s not …”_

_He stopped._

_“Not?” whispered Numair._

_“I keep my promises,” answered the badger without answering, “but I cannot meddle with humans. I can’t help those you’ve left behind, and I can’t fix what’s wrong inside you. The girl can. I promise that she is of worth to you.”_

_Numair wanted to argue that he didn’t need to be bribed with a child’s worth, not if that child was in danger. He’d help her if he could simply because his heart ached all the way through at the thought of a someone lost like he had been and was again. But the sett was fading fast. He was waking up._

_“Of course she has worth to me,” he settled for saying. “She’s human, isn’t she?”_


	2. These Gentle Hands

Numair returned to the living from the badger’s sett to find that the day had fled while he was sleeping. In fact, he suspected many days had scuttled merrily by while he’d been fevered. He didn’t blame them for not wanting to hang around. Existence was as miserable as he currently was. His wing was splinted and had the deep ache of being partially healed. Though he was cleaner than he had been, he was deliriously hungry. When he tried to struggle upright to stagger out of his soft nest of blankets and hay, his body was too weak to respond to his commands.

A sound next to him was loud enough that Numair startled, woozy with how fast his shocked heart was beating. Everything inside him was out of kilter. He whirled, swayed, and managed to refocus in the dim light of the small, dingy room they were in. A loaded fireplace lit it up, but that was it. No light leaked in through the heavy shutters, and the door similarly was thick, the bar not pulled across. The ground was dirt; the roof thatched. 

The source of the sound was a man asleep half-curled around Numair’s blanket nest. The man was huddled low in his blankets, using a coat as a pillow and with hay in his curly hair. Numair examined him with new eyes, aware that this man had been here for days with him but only now conscious enough to take him in, from his brow which seemed permanently lowered in a scowl, even asleep, to the haughty shape of his dark, narrow face. 

There were various implements scattered beside them. Bowls and herbs and a pestle. There was also a plate of what looked like strips of raw meat which had been left for some time sitting in their juice, dangerously close to the man’s limp hand. Numair stared at them, his stomach cramping with hunger but also bubbling unpleasantly at the concept of eating, especially raw meat. But if he didn’t eat, he’d die. That was as simple as it could be.

The man snored, fidgeting in his blanket nest. Numair sympathised. He slept poorly too. 

It wasn’t quite enough noise to hide the sound of the door scuffing open.

Numair’s head snapped around, sharp vision latching onto the wraith creeping in. The man, for all that he was sleeping in a hovel – albeit a hovel which had some surely expensive fittings added by someone for some reason – was covered in fine woollen blankets and his hair was soft and clean. This creature, whom Numair couldn’t even tell the sex of in such an ill-lit room, was nothing of the sort. Cold wind blew in through the crack they slipped into the room through, bringing with it the sharp scent of neglect. Sweat and dirt and street scum, the creature’s eyes latched on Numair below a matted mass of tangled knots. The hand that clung to the door was skin pulled over a framework of delicate bones, caked with grime and skinny enough to break any heart. Numair stiffened, wondering if he was about to be stolen for some peasant’s pot, the man knifed and robbed beside him. There was little Numair could do to stop it happening. He could barely hold his head up.

They watched each other warily, the man trapped as a bird and this starved snippet of humanity, neither sure of the other.

The creature crept into the light. Numair saw a stubborn mouth and hard blue-grey eyes and reassessed: this snippet was a girl, under all the dirt and that mess of hair. That mouth was too pretty for a man, though the one sleeping behind him could give her a fair run for her money.

Numair couldn’t help but flinch as the girl slipped closer and reached for him, but her touch was the kindest thing he’d felt since leaving the company of the King’s Own for Sinthya. Despite dirty nails and battered knuckles, she was so careful with him that he felt like he was made of glass, featherlight, fragile. It was playing havoc with his sense of gravity, though that, he admitted, could also be the hunger.

Something pulled at his mind. When he responded, he found himself tugged appealingly towards something that longed for him … but then his mind brushed the source, and he was lost.

He woke cradled in thin arms against a cold chest, stunned to realise he’d passed out. He hadn’t even felt it coming. The girl was looking down at him with the too-big eyes in her hungry face wide, as shocked as he was about his suddenly slipping unconscious.

“It happened again,” she said, her Gallan accent crude. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, brave lad.”

“He still hasn’t eaten,” said the man.

Numair shuddered all over. Small surprises became big ones when his body was so cautiously alive. That was the voice he’d heard when being carried through the city, the voice that had pulled him from that wall. No man with that voice was born to this hovel. It was the sharpest comparison to the girl’s commoner cant. The girl went stiff against Numair, her fingers tightening in his feathers. She said nothing.

The man, propping himself up on one elegantly tilted elbow, added, “You said he’d die if I couldn’t feed him.”

“I did and he’s working on it,” said the girl, her gaze locked on Numair and her expression annoyed. “You need a bird healer again. With proper magic. Your stubbornness is going to kill him, Marquis Savigny.”

There was silence following that, her voice as hard and cold as Numair fancied the ground outside was judging from the terrible breeze still wafting through the door. The girl had left it open, likely for a quick escape if the man awoke. But the man _had_ woken, and she hadn’t moved. He wondered.

“This is stupid,” said the man, “How would you like it if I started calling you Veralidaine? But if it makes you feel better, fine. Call me lord and hide behind the distance it gives you, never mind that those that love you barely sleep at night thinking of you cold and gone in some gutter, knifed by a brigand or killed by a blizzard. Just why won’t you come _home_ and do it?”

The girl – Veralidaine – was feeling Numair’s wing as the man spoke. She didn’t seem to be listening; Numair could do nothing but.

She said, “It’s no place for a bastard, in a marquis’s bed, Mar –”

“Savigny, if you’re too petty right now to use Sav,” said the man. “I’m tired of this. Stop lashing out at me because you’re feeling terrible. It’s ridiculous, you refusing to use my first name.”

“I wouldn’t dare be so familiar,” was the short response.

“You used to.”

There was that silence again. Numair let his head laze against the dirty fingers propping them up, closing his eyes and hearing his chest wheeze out a strained breath.

 _This is as wondrous as kittens falling in love, this little illicit affair you two are messing about with,_ he thought irritably at the byplay going on over his head, _but I’d like to draw your attention back down to me, thank you very much. If I’m not to be the centre of attention while dying, what really is the point?_

Savigny stood, pulling his blankets up with him and offering them to the girl without hesitation even though she surely, at least, had fleas. Numair was flummoxed. As unamused as he was by their nonsense while he was in such dire straits, the disparity of their positions was so great as to be ludicrous. Even in the theatre, the peasant girl who loved nobility was always depicted as clean.

“I’m going to find fresh meat for it,” said Savigny. He crouched as Veralidaine refused to take the blankets, wrapping them around her shoulders and studying her face. Whatever he saw in her expression, it turned his mouth down. “I’ll be back. Stay in the warm and don’t flee. Will you at least tell me what beast took you this time?”

Veralidaine shook her head.

With a sigh, Savigny left.

 _Is it you?_ Numair asked her, trying to pull his magic up to study her truly but almost passing out again, this time from exertion. _Are you that strange feeling in my head? If you are, can you hear me?_

Veralidaine didn’t respond, just whispered, “It’s he, not it,” after the man, though he was long gone, before gathering up Numair and blankets alike and taking them closer to the fire to examine him in the light.

“Will you at least take some water?” Veralidaine asked of Numair, who tried a nod which didn’t quite come across as he’d intended since she seemed unfazed by his attempt at human communication. “I don’t understand what you are. You’re all wrong for a hawk, though it’s been a fair long while since I worked with them, I guess.” She studied him, those eyes narrowing with thought. “Not long enough to make you make sense.”

Numair opened his beak obediently for the water she dripped in on the end of a hollowed-out reed, accepting what she gave and asking for no more. Maybe under the muddled mass of need that was his body right now, he was still thirsty, but he couldn’t pick it out as a prominent desire so it wasn’t worth begging. He didn’t have the energy.

Veralidaine stared at him as he subsided in her lap, aware that his beak was gaping as he struggled to breathe. 

“His Grace …” she began, her mouth twisting with grim amusement before she altered what she was going to say: “Savigny, he said he tried animal healers with you, of all sorts. None of them could fix you or even figure what you are. Some even wanted to buy you, to cut you up and peek inside to see what’s made you so wrong. He wouldn’t let them. He’s a fair sort, for a noble. You’d do worse than to end up on his arm, you know, even if it’s inappropriate.”

She lifted him, Numair grumbling but helping her balance his weight. 

“Any normal hawk would savage me for such indignity,” she added with the mild manner of one used to speaking to those who weren’t expected to respond. “Come to think of it, any normal hawk would be long dead. You’ve been like this a week, mayhaps more depending on how long you were stuck in that wall or being chased by whatever took bits from your wing. You’re an impossible thing. And you’re working hard at dying, even I can tell.”

She lowered him, nestling him back into the lap before glancing thoughtfully at the herbs.

“I wish you’d stay,” she said finally. Her fingers stroked his back. Numair leaned into the touch. The desire for kindness was stronger than the thirst, the pain, the hunger. For the first time, he realised why people feared dying alone; fading softly away under such a human touch, passed from one gentle hand to another as the Black God took him, that wasn’t such a terrifying notion. But she wasn’t done. “You remind me of me. We’re both impossible things that keep on living despite everything telling us to stop.”

 _I’ll make you a deal,_ thought Numair to her with ill-humour, _I’ll survive if you do._

Though he knew she was just speaking aloud whatever thoughts she was battling with in her own mind, her soft, “If only,” felt like it was just for him. He took it that way anyway.


	3. Hawk Hearted

_"You found her,” said the badger, sounding so pleased with himself that Numair briefly considered throwing up on him just to knock him down a peg. “That was fast.”_

_“Her?” Numair asked. “ **This** is the child you lost? She’s twenty if she’s a day!”_

_They were still in the hovel, Veralidaine dozing by the fire where she’d been lured to sleep by the warmth that Numair doubted she got to experience too often. Numair was nestled in her lap, the badger snuffling around their feet. Despite Numair still being a hawk, the badger seemed to have no trouble understanding him. It wasn’t at all like the dream of the sett, and it made Numair apprehensive. After deciding to live, this was far too much like dying._

_“Twenty-six, if I’m counting human lifespans correctly,” said the badger._

_Numair looked at Veralidaine again, shocked. They were the same age. He couldn’t imagine how different their lives had been or, rather, how perilously alike in places. It was pure luck that he wasn’t just like her: hungry, afraid, haunted, alone._

_With a sickening twist of his gut, he realised moments later that, right now, he was exactly all those things._

_“Something is still wrong.” The badger put his paws on Veralidaine’s knees and leaned into her face, studying her as she slept. Numair ducked his head, uneasy about those teeth lingering so close. Despite the badger’s size and those claws, he left no mark on Veralidaine’s skin and she didn’t stir at all. “Mage, what do you see of her?”_

_“Nothing,” said Numair tiredly. “I can’t see anything. Just a woman.”_

_“Look harder.”_

_Numair tried but he couldn’t manage his own magic, let alone anyone else’s. The badger seemed to realise that he was trying though, taking pity on him. He blew foul-scented air into Numair’s face, and Numair could **see**. Veralidaine had wild magic, a chaotic amount of it. It spilled out in a tangled mess, knotted into hard balls of hurting lodged within her. There was also a foreign Gift, not hers or one that Numair recognised, wrapped around it, ensnared where it had tried to contain the rampant wild magic before it had spilled over. Now, the stranger’s Gift was almost swallowed, only visible as smothered glints of rose-pink within copper. It had either been applied sloppily, or the magic it was trying to contain was far too chaotic for it. Numair would put his coin on both._

_It was a wonder she wasn’t completely mad._

_“That’s why I can’t speak to her,” said the badger to Numair. “She’s spoiled herself. Hmph.”_

_“Gods,” whispered Numair, aghast. “No one would do that to themselves on purpose.”_

_The door opened, both Numair and the badger looking over at it as a figure, too small to be Savigny, crept in. This one was huddled in a well-worn hooded cowl, which he pulled back once he’d looked around and found himself alone except for Veralidaine. It was a boy. Numair estimated him to be thirteen or fourteen, if that. He had Savigny’s tightly curled hair and dark, narrow face, but his features were softer. He didn’t look at the badger, who muttered to himself._

_“Look at that,” grumbled the badger. “Stupid kits. What are their parents teaching them? That’s no way to treat good sensible wild magic”_

_As soon as he’d mentioned it, Numair could see it. This boy’s magic was as bound as Veralidaine’s, though it seemed that it was less voracious about escaping those bounds. The rose-coloured Gift coated the boy completely, with only glimmers of a dull yellow-amber showing about his hands and heart indicating that there was magic hidden beneath, magic the boy would struggle to access fully with the other Gift blocking him. There was still something strange about those bindings, but in his current state Numair couldn’t even begin to unpack them._

_Numair was fascinated, and disturbed._

_“Daine?” whispered the boy to Veralidaine, who still slept. His voice was deeper than expected considering how young he looked, having already shed his child voice for a man’s. Numair looked at the badger, who was staring at the woman expressionlessly. That was unsurprising. Numair wasn’t exactly practised at reading the expressions of badgers. “Daine? Wake up. I came to see Sav’s bird.”_

_“Time for me to go,” said the badger abruptly, looking again at Numair. “Figure out how to fix my girl, mage. You need her magic working if you’re going to face what’s coming.”_

_Numair went to snap something irritable about gods and their ridiculous ways of never being straight about their warnings, but_ the badger was gone and he was sleepily stirring in Veralidaine’s lap, looking around to find the boy still lingering by the door.

Veralidaine jerked awake, one hand settled on Numair holding him steady even as her other darted to her waist for a knife that Numair hadn’t seen she was wearing. It was a reflex though. As soon as she woke up enough to focus on the boy’s face, her hand dropped away from the weapon.

“Constant!” she hissed, rubbing her eyes with her one free hand. “How did you get here? We’re in the middle of the Bog! In the dark!”

“I’ve been sneaking out for years.” The boy beamed, darting forward to skid to his knees beside Veralidaine – with no care for his expensive breeches – and peer down at Numair, his expression rapt. “I muffled Thibault’s hooves. And I wore the worst of my clothes, so I’d fit in. This cloak is _years_ old.”

Numair peered up at Veralidaine just as she looked away to hide her mouth twitching into a strained smile, leading to a brief moment where it was as though the hawk and Veralidaine were exchanging a shared, exasperated thought of _nobles._ That cloak, old or not, was worth a month of bread. 

“His Grace is going to be furious to see you here,” said Veralidaine.

“He hates it when you call him that,” said Constant. “It makes him moody, and he’s awful when he’s moody. He glowers.”

Without asking permission, he’d reached into Veralidaine’s lap and taken up Numair. Numair didn’t protest. He was curious about the shy flickers of magic he could feel tickling him through the boy’s fingertips, as though the badger’s breath had given him just a whisper of his Gift back. Enough to recognise it in others, even if he needed more oomph to be able to manipulate his own.

“Oh, this is a glorious creature,” said Constant, still with that delighted expression. If Numair hadn’t felt so ill, he’d be preening. It was nice to be admired. “Isn’t he superb? But he’s lost so much weight! Is that why his feathers are so dull?”

Veralidaine shrugged, pulling her knees to her chest and leaning her chin on them as she watched the boy and Numair with those blue-grey eyes in the mask of dirt. The boy seemed even more delicate in comparison.

“There are powders to settle his stomach if he’s still vomiting up his feed.” Constant had looped his hand through Numair’s talons now and was trying to encourage him to perch. Numair felt dizzy at the thought of supporting his own weight, pulling his feet up and glaring at the boy for even trying. “Has Sav tried them?”

“Surely,” replied Veralidaine. “He’s a foolish noble, but not that foolish. Not where hawks are concerned. You’d have known to remember him in your parents’ mews, before …”

She stopped, uncertain. The boy’s expression was frozen, his mouth still in a smile but his eyes hurting.

“Sorry,” she said, looking away.

“It’s fine. I don’t remember anyway. I wish we still had hawks. That would be better than anything else in the world. Maybe if we fix this one, we can keep him in the mews? We don’t need to tell Sav. He never goes there.”

Veralidaine buried her face in her knees and said nothing.

“He _is_ a weird hawk though.” Constant stared at Numair and, for the briefest heartbeat, Numair felt a wild snarl of magic lick at him through the boy’s grip, tempered before it had time to do anything. But it was enough. Constant’s eyes widened. “Oh! Maybe he’s like you?”

Veralidaine looked at him.

“You know,” he said, “a witch.”

 _“I like you much better than your brother,”_ Numair tried to say to him through the trace of wild magic Constant had left behind. _“If you get me out of this mess, I’ll make sure you’re given the most spectacular mews in existence. Hawks of every colour, all yours, and me as your personal tutor. Deal?”_

“Mithros knows that better not be my brother sitting there,” said the mildest voice Numair had ever heard coming from a man as visibly furious as Savigny was, glowering at Constant from the doorway where he stood with two almost-dead rats hanging from one hand. “Since that would involve him skipping his merry way all the way through the Bog in the middle of the night, no guards, no knife, no brains to speak of.”

“I’m not carrying anything precious –” Constant protested, but Savigny cut him off with a snarled, “Your life is precious!”

“Sav’s right,” said Veralidaine, not seeming to notice that she’d forgotten the formality of the man’s title. She was giving the rats an uncomfortable stare. “If you were recognised, you know there’s nothing stopping someone trying to ransom you.”

“Sav would never pay up,” muttered Constant to Numair as though the others couldn’t hear.

“I would,” said Savigny, the anger fading and leaving him tired instead. “Even if I didn’t to teach you a dearly required lesson, Don would. That man has more heart than sense, and some know it. Spare me the idiocy. Will the bird eat rat? I thought we might tempt him to hunt if they weren’t cold.”

 _“The bird will not,”_ said Numair, offended.

“I wouldn’t try,” said Veralidaine. “A healthy Bog rat will put up a fight, even against a hawk. Especially a sick one. He’ll end up clawed, and they go for the eyes.”

Numair hissed at the rats.

Constant, sulking, said, “Well, I think the hawk is a witch. Like Daine.”

There was a cold, striking silence. Numair felt his feathers ruffle at the tension such a simple declaration caused.

“Why’s that so bad?” demanded Constant as he looked from his brother to Veralidaine. “The Sniffers won’t care if he’s with us. They don’t bother nobles. And we can help him if he is, just like we helped Daine when the horses took her. Right, Daine?”

They all looked at Veralidaine, who gave Savigny a helpless look.

Abruptly, Numair noticed Savigny’s Gift, a dim glow within him buried deep.

It was rose-coloured.

“We used a mage with horse magic to call you back last time,” said Savigny finally to Veralidaine, his voice reluctant. “She’s not around anymore. We’d need someone with a knack for hawks to do anything with this creature if Constant’s right. Unless you …?”

 _“If you don’t know your brother is affined to hawks through his wild magic, you’re more of a fool than I thought,”_ Numair said, incredulous, to Savigny. It was blatant. The boy had wild magic and the draw to hawks to creep across the slums in the middle of the night to see one in person. When Numair got his mouth back, he was going to be saying a few words about the quality of the Gift in Galla if so many of their children were going unnoticed and untaught.

“Too risky,” said Veralidaine. She sounded miserable. “You should take him back. You can’t do anything with the Gift in the Bog, not right now. Noble or not, they’ll come knocking.”

Alarmed, Numair realised she was suggesting they leave her here. He doubted his ability to find her again for the badger if they did that, even if they were successful in figuring out a way to yank him from the hawk-shape. Though, he thought, if he stayed this sensible, maybe he’d be able to do it himself soon. That would be nice. It’d give them a shock, anyway.

“Let me try –” started Constant, but he stopped as Savigny gave him a dire stare. Blushing, the boy looked down to Numair, meeting the hawk’s gaze as Savigny breezed past and began to pack things into a bag, ignoring Veralidaine’s soft protests as they began to bicker about her coming. 

The magic tugged distantly at Numair again. Numair tried to meet it midway, but it was just out of reach. Brow furrowed, expression focused, it was obviously the boy’s magic Numair was feeling. It just wasn’t enough, not on its own.

Savigny’s hand lashed out, grabbing the boy’s arm. Numair was almost tossed out of his grip, voicing his own scratchy hawk-complaints as Veralidaine lunged for him. Between Constant and Veralidaine, they managed to avoid dropping Numair, but only barely. Savigny didn’t seem to care, shaking Constant. 

“You fool, even I felt that!” Savigny snapped. Numair clawed his way onto Veralidaine’s tunic and hung there, supported by her thin arms. “You know _better._ ”

“You’ll let him die if I leave him to you!” Constant protested, trying and failing to get loose. “You always do! You and Daine – you’re as bad as each other for letting creatures die that you could save _._ That’s why we have Gifts!”

“Well, the king doesn’t share your feelings about that.”

“It’s _Don!_ He’s Don before he’s _the king_. Why do you do this, why do you treat everyone like they’re strangers and drive them away? I hate it!”

Veralidaine had backed away from the arguing brothers, coming to rest by the hearth as she hunkered down with Numair pulled against her. Her eyes ticked from one boy to the other, a frown furrowing her forehead as she listened. Her hand supported Numair’s chest. Numair focused on those fingers for a lack of anything else to focus on, becoming aware of his heart thudding under them. As soon as he noticed that, it was all he could notice, closing his eyes and centring himself: heart, lungs, all the veins and arteries that mapped out his body. He felt his feathers and his skin, his talons tucked in close, the shape of his wings and tail. His Gift lingered, just out of reach. He could feel it as he drifted close to the state he entered when he meditated. It was right there. Just a little more and he could _have_ it. Just a little more …

There was another heartbeat. He noticed it seconds before he noticed her, turning his attention towards the echo that thumped a mere instant after his. Veralidaine’s eyes were closed, that frown vanished. Her knotted, furious magic had calmed, called towards placidity by the soothing shift of his own. She didn’t seem aware that she was feeling his Gift through her hands on him, or that he was affecting her magic through his – which, if he was human and her teacher, would be a horrifying realisation because it made her vulnerable to external forces who might wish to manipulate her. Right here, however, it meant he might be able to meet her midway.

 _“My name is Numair,”_ he called to her, focusing his voice on the heartbeat where her magic was the strongest. _“Veralidaine – reach for me. I can’t get back by myself. I need your help.”_

Something in her had heard. He saw her magic begin to spill from her with intent, some of it directed at him and the voice he was calling to her with, but most of it uncontained and messy. He itched to teach her to meditate. She was using too much for too little. 

_“Careful,”_ he warned. _“Don’t overreach. Just come towards my voice. You only need a little of your power to do so. It’s as easy as reaching for my hand.”_

 _You don’t have hands,_ he heard her loudly thinking.

He tried to think of his human shape and how it had looked, but the feeling of it evaded him. For all his awareness of his current form – feathers, wings, beak – the man he had been was distant, far away. 

Something lost. 

Panic spiked that he’d be stuck as a hawk forever, his heartbeat speeding up, his breath catching, a wave of anxious dizziness overtaking him and leaving him reeling and sick.

_“Shh, it’s okay. It’s okay. Don’t panic. Here.”_

Her voice was clearer now, as though she’d figured out that they were speaking, not just thinking. It wrapped around him, soft and accented. From the middle of his panic, he wondered how he could have ever found it crude.

She was trying to show him what a hand would look, reaching hers towards his tangled mind. Fingers and joints, small scars, calluses: a life in process visible in the skin covering the twenty-seven bones of the human hand. Desperate and frightened, he grabbed at what she was offering and felt her magic surge over him, overwhelming. 

Too much. 

Too fast. 

Any concept of being a man vanished. He thrashed and screeched, thinking of flying, the sky, air under him and a mate waiting, the thrill of hunting and the power of his dive and the taste of the kill –

 _“Oh no!”_ he heard her cry from far above. He’d slipped from her grasp and fallen, both physically and within himself too, lost into the swallowing depths of his hawk shape. He plunged, unable to stop himself. At least, he thought, there were worse ends than to forever be a hawk pampered by a spoiled noble.

The last thing he was aware of for the longest time was Veralidaine plunging after him, just as unstoppable, just as uncontrolled.


	4. A Parabolic Boy

The guards working the inner gate of Cría had seen their share of strange going-ons recently, with the annual great fair working to bring all manner of itinerant folks into their city. Most of those who came to the city for the fair weren’t the kinds of folk allowed into the noble’s quarters of the city known as the Jewel, however, so when dawn brought the sound of hooves approaching the closed gates, they were wary. Two riders came at speed on the fine spotted horses of old Gallan nobility, cloaks obscuring the riders’ faces. The guards stepped out, pikes crossed as they called for the riders to halt.

In the uncertain silence of the horses skidding to a stop on the cobbles, metal shoes clattering and breath steaming in the frigid air, the oldest of the guards decided to take command. He wasn’t overly worried. Strange folk there might be in the city, but these were Gallan horses and the cloaks were richly made. No doubt they were noble carollers who’d been locked out when the inner gates closed for the night.

“Identify yourselves,” he demanded. In the dim light from the lantern hung on the wall behind him and the hazy blue dawn sunlight just beginning to trickle overhead, he could see that one of the riders was a boy, if that, on a horse too big for him. The other beast was burdened by two.

“We’re barely a quarter-hour early for the gates,” said the taller rider, a man. His tone was irate. “Move aside, Gil. I’ve business with my bed.”

It took Gil a moment too long to recognise the voice. Sabre was faster, lowering her pike and using the butt to slap the back of his legs.

“Kneel, cracknob,” she hissed, doing so herself. “Your Grace, we didn’t recognise you with your face obscured. Beg pardon. We’d never presume to meddle with your affairs.”

The Marquis de Hartholm snorted rudely, tossing his hood back with an irate stare at them that Gil looked down and away from. But not before seeing the smaller rider peering at him and realising who it must be but the youngest Lord Hartholm, riding using only his knees as he kept his arms wrapped around a basket clasped tight to his chest.

It had been a long time since the man in front of him had been someone Gil had known, and thus he made no further comment as he and Sabre scrambled up and went for the gate lever. No more conversation passed between them as they bowed the two riders past, waiting until the sounds of hooves on cobbles had faded completely before relaxing once more.

“Now, I’m not at all surprised the marquis spent the night out in the commons,” said Sabre with a weary shake of her head as soon as they were certain the two nobles were well and truly gone, “but the young one? Be a pity to see him taking up his brother’s ways.”

“I’m more curious as to what the marquis was doing with a lady on his horse,” said Gil. He couldn’t help but double-check that no one was listening in. Old habits died hard, and it was well known in Cría that Hartholms died harder. There was no real way of knowing that their reputation had passed along with the current marquis’s parents, especially since knowing someone as a boy was no promise of knowing them when they were a man. Gil decided against further speculation, desiring to keep this job for as long as he was able, and his neck too. “That’s enough about that. Whatever they were doing, it’s their own business, and we’re smarter than to chatter about nobles who have the ear of the king.”

“I heard the king doesn’t want anything to do with him –” Sabre began, brightening at the opportunity to gossip.

Gil stared at her until she subsided.

“Understood,” she muttered. They retook their places.

Try as he might, Gil couldn’t help but keep wondering.

“Put the hawk aside and get the horses away,” snapped Sav, dismounting Corentin in an easy motion. Just as smoothly, he took the limp Daine into his arms and strode for the kitchen servant-way into their home. Constant slid from Thibault and grabbed for Corentin’s reins where Sav had left them dangling. It was a wonder he didn’t drop the basket as he went, but he managed to fling himself upright from sheer practice at not falling.

Ruben stood by the servant-way, his expression dire as he saw Daine. That wasn’t anything different from usual though. The old valet was one of the few servants that Sav had tolerated staying after he’d inherited, and Constant had no memory of the man being anything other than dire. But Ruben also knew Sav better than anyone else, even Constant. It was no surprise when, instead of following Sav and Daine into the building, he crossed the courtyard to where Constant stood trying to juggle the hawk in his basket and the two horses’ reins.

“If the young lady is recuperating here once more, His Grace will be wanting the horses stabled off the grounds,” said Ruben without preamble to Constant, holding out his hand for the reins. “I’ll take them to my home. Lil will be very pleased to see Thibault again.”

“Don’t stable them together,” Constant said hurriedly, glad to wriggle out of the chore and chase his brother to see if Daine was alright. “They’ll kick each other if given half the chance. Thanks!”

Getting a better grip on the basket, he hurtled after Sav, reaching for the door ready to slam through in just the fashion Ruben was always telling him off for –

A terrible feeling struck his chest like a knife and Constant yelped, trying to turn to face the awful feeling while still in motion. His shoulder hit the door, foot catching the step, and it was sheer luck that his hand caught the ornate handle well enough to keep himself upright as he swayed, nausea bubbling up from deep inside him. It felt like the part of him that he used with the gate-soldiers’ messenger hawks when they let him into the city mews, the part that told him if a hawk was happy or sad or ailing or fierce, but this time it was wrong. Metallic and ringing, making his head hurt like a blow to the temple.

Ruben hadn’t seen. He had his back to Constant as he led the horses from the yard. No doubt he’d ride Thibault once he was out of the gates, but he wouldn’t presume to do that in front of Constant or Savigny. They did try to pretend they were proper nobles at least some of the time, and Gallan law said only those of noble blood could ride the spotted horses that were Galla’s pride in horseflesh. Constant looked up for the source of the feeling, scanning the lightly clouded skies. 

“Did you feel anything?” he asked the silent basket, unclipping the lid to peer in. The hawk was still an unmoving puddle of matte black feathers, as he’d been since Daine’s magic had gone wrong, again. He was conscious but staring, beak open and eyes glazed. Daine had once taught Constant that that whiteness was because hawks had another eyelid they used to protect their eyes, and it also showed illness or hurt. But that had been before she’d gotten so scared of losing herself to animals, and he swallowed down a lump of misery at the thought that she’d probably never teach him anything to do with hawks again. That was, of course, if she was okay, which he was certain she would be. They’d bring her back, just like the other times.

Shaking off the awful feeling – at least as much as he could since it stayed lingering overhead – Constant let the lid drop closed and hauled the dead weight of the basket through the doorway and into the silent kitchens, up an unlit servant stairway and through the door that led to the bedrooms. It was designed to be invisible from the outside when closed, but Constant had long-ago propped it open with a basket of rocks. There was, as always, no sound in the house except for Constant’s boots on the dusty carpets, and no light either except for that which spilled from the open door of Sav’s room up ahead.

“Something bad is in the sky,” Constant announced, walking in without knocking to find Daine laid out gently on the bed and Sav fumbling with the fire. Sav paused to glance at his brother, mouth thinning, but didn’t say anything. “Why don’t you just use magic to light it? There’s no one here but me, and I won’t tell. Well, Daine, but she’s definitely not going to tell either.”

“Don’t be insolent,” said Sav. Despite this, he tossed the flint down on the heath and stood, the wood he’d stacked ready bursting into rose-coloured flames. Savigny flinched as it did so. Constant ignored this. Savigny always winced where his Gift was concerned; it was nothing new.

“Do you need something to wake her?” Constant asked. 

He was trying to remember where he’d left the healer’s kit he and Sav had put together piecemeal over the years, mostly as a response to one injury or another. There was an unhappy notion in his mind that he’d left it behind in Ruben’s stables last time he was in there seeing to a crow with a crooked foot.

“No. I’d prefer her asleep for now.”

Despite how calm he sounded, Sav was hesitant. Standing midway between the fire and the bed with the barest hint of uncertainty in his expression. Constant looked past him to where Daine lay still, eyes closed and face calm like it never was when she was awake.

“You do _know_ what to do to help her, don’t you?” Constant asked.

Sav looked at him.

“Oh no,” said Constant. Sidling through the doorway, he inched over to the bed and peered over Daine, a thrill darting up his spine again as he examined the downy coating that had sprouted across her face, smoothing out into a crown of brown-and-white mottled feathers around her hairline. They were, undoubtedly –

“Spectacular,” whispered Constant, reaching down to touch a loose feather which had become tangled in Daine’s mass of hair. He picked the feather up and set the hawk’s basket beside the bed before turning to look at Sav. “Do you think you should find a healer?”

Sav grimaced. Constant didn’t blame him. Healers were hard to come by in Cría lately.

“Food!” Constant declared, inspiration striking. “I’ll get something hot and good. She wouldn’t have been eating well –” Sav scowled at that, which Constant felt bad for, but he never understood why Sav took it so personally that Daine preferred starving on the streets to staying here when she was going through her bad times. It was clearly Daine’s decision. “– so maybe the smell will pull her back enough that we can just talk her out. Last time, she was _all_ horse. She’s still mostly human now.”

“Alright.” Sav’s answer was begrudging, but Constant counted any permission as a success. He tripped his way backwards, leaving the hawk basket there as he was eager to vanish before his brother changed his mind. “Just make something, don’t leave the –”

“I know, yeah, yeah,” Constant called. He was already out of the room and running, with no intention of making anything. He’d had _another_ idea. 

Constant zipping from place to place was a familiar enough sight on their street that the gate-guards of the grand house three places up from the Hartholm’s did nothing but glance up to ensure it was him before going back to their dice game. Constant hurtled past them and through the courtyard, pausing only to pat one of the carriage horses before skirting the building around to the kitchen’s entrance. 

“Goddess bless, only one person opens my door so violently,” was the greeting that awaited him when he burst in to find the lean form of Ellara, the head cook, looming with a ladle and a waiting frown. “You’re going to take someone out with that door one day, boy.”

Behind Ellara, the rest of the kitchen staff had dropped into hurried curtseys, but Constant ignored them.

“I’m in a hurry,” he declared. “Is Adel home?”

There was a general titter around the room which Constant, much as he had the curtseys, ignored. The servants in here were all girls, and girls – noble or not – were increasingly strange creatures to him.

“The Lord is upstairs in his study,” replied Ellara in a voice that Constant could only describe as excruciatingly disapproving. “Your brother’s ways are rubbing off on you. Only he would be so impertinent to refer to the Lord of Darragon by his given name.”

“Sorry,” said Constant, not meaning it. “Is Lord de Darragon home?”

That would have earned him a tap on the shoulder with the ladle if he weren’t so well-practised at avoiding it, deftly skirting Ellara and heading for the door. A maid saw him coming and held it open for him, still managing to curtsey despite her hands being on the door.

Constant was never going to understand maids. He was glad Sav had dismissed all theirs, even if it meant that they lived their lives eternally dusty.

“Stop taking the servant-ways!” he heard Ellara hollering after him. “And come back on your way out for feeding!”

With a sigh, he changed direction and went for the main halls.

“Servants are fussier than nobles,” he muttered to himself as he went. This earned him a scathing glare from a passing valet.

Constant, briefly, considered curtseying to the man.

It was two flights upstairs to get to the lord’s study. Constant was panting by the time he reached the top, pausing to knock impatiently on the heavy doors between him and his goal. The room he entered was a study and a library _and_ a collection of wonderful things, filled with paintings of strange animals and diagrams of every bird imaginable. There were boxes lined with velvet filled with exciting specimens of feathers and talons alongside reference books Constant would need four arms to carry alone. Constant had spent more time here growing up than he had his own bedroom.

“My wife worries so terribly about you, young Hartholm,” were the lord’s first words to him. 

Constant stopped before the man’s desk, taking a deep breath to catch his lungs up before offering a quick bow. Adel merely waved his hand at him. As much as they’d tried over the last six years, Constant had proved resistant to learning matters of etiquette. At this point, everyone was exhausted from trying. 

“Worries, sir?” asked Constant, effectively distracted. “Why worries? I’m fine.”

The lord raised heavy eyebrows briefly in Constant’s direction before they collapsed back over his eyes. Constant stifled a smile; Lord de Darragon’s incredible ginger beard and momentous eyebrows were a source of great delight to him. 

“She says to me, ‘Adel, I could have sworn that the boy was being raised by his brother, but to hear him galloping through our home, you’d think herds of horses had had something to do with it.” The lord paused, evidently waiting for Constant to respond, but Constant wasn’t sure if that was a joke or not. He settled for smiling with all his teeth instead, thinking of horse-Daine with another sharp sting of anxiety. “Your behaviour is parabolic, boy.”

“Parabolic, sir?”

There was no asking Adel for anything until he was done making his point, Constant had learned, no matter how nervous he was about what was happening to his hawk or to Daine while he was here.

“Mathematics, Constant! A U-shaped plane-curve, like this.”

Heaving his great bulk from the plush chair he was reclining in while examining the parchment in his hands, Adel ambled to a large section of slate propped against a wall and began earnestly diagramming said U-shaped plane-curve.

“See,” he said, pointing with the pencil to one side of the curve. “Sprinting everywhere! Gods. It’s endearing when you’re a child, at this side of the curve, and becomes progressively less so as you age.” He placed a mark halfway down the left side of the U and added, “You’re here, almost a man grown. Once you get to the bottom of the curve, let’s say that’s thirty years old, then you are most definitely strange instead of endearing. Do you want to be strange?”

Constant peered at the diagram. “No, sir. But does that mean it’s acceptable again once I’m sixty?”

Adel had flopped back into his chair, which protested with a low groan of timber.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Then you become eccentric. What is it you’re here for?”

It took Constant a few seconds to reorientate his thoughts. Then, with a rush, his plan reasserted itself.

“Could I borrow your book on mammal anatomy?” he asked.

Sav wasn’t in the room with Daine and Constant’s hawk when Constant got back, laden with the heavy anatomy book under one arm and a stacked basket of food looped over his other. Ellara, much as she had for the past six years, had insisted upon packing enough food to last them almost a week, certain – not incorrectly – that neither Sav nor Constant prioritised nutrition as much as they should. 

The first thing he did was check on his hawk, which was horribly still in his basket.

“Oh no, don’t be dead,” whispered Constant, lifting the limp weight of feathers out and carrying him tenderly to the bed where Daine was half-curled on her side. Feathers had shed from her but more had regrown in their place. It was as though she was trapped in a battle between her human self and her hawk, something Constant could sympathise with. The hawk, once Constant had settled himself on the bed with basket, book, and bird, was revealed to be alive and breathing, but barely.

Constant thought about it before unpacking the food onto the bed, the scent of hot meat pie filling the air. His own stomach cramped at it. He had been hungry on the way back, but now he was just miserable. There was so little life in this room with him. 

Once the food was in place, he took his hawk and carefully settled him into his lap. Then he placed Daine’s unmoving hand onto the listless creature, hoping that, somehow, she’d feel the bird needing her from wherever she was trapped.

Finally, he propped the book beside him and used the hand not holding Daine’s hand in place to carefully turn the delicate pages, revealing diagram after diagram of beautifully detailed animals. As he went, he read what information there was, describing what he could see for her. There weren’t any birds, which made him sad because he loved birds best of all, but he did what he could with what he had. He was hoping something that Daine had used to love so much would bring her back to them, and he put as much heart as he could into his loving descriptions of each and every animal depicted in the glorious book.

It didn’t seem to be working. 

Midway through the anatomy of the hare, Constant faltered. The hawk’s heartbeat against his thigh was slower than ever, and there were tiny pin feathers on Daine’s fingers now he could have sworn hadn’t been there before.

“You _can’t_ ,” he said to her, furious now. “You’re supposed to stop being cracked and come home, you _promised._ And if you turn into a hawk, we can’t make you stay like we did when you turned into the horse. You’ll just fly away and that’s not fair. My hawk will die and Sav won’t have any of his friends left.”

He looked down at his hawk, swallowing hard.

“I understand, though. I don’t think I’d pick being a human if I had a choice, either, not for anything. I’d fly away for sure and spend my life in the sky. The hawks never feel like I do when I touch them, never. They never …”

But he stopped, realising something.

When they’d found the hawk, Constant hadn’t felt anything hawk-like about it. Not at all like a real hawk, where there was this vibrant sense of understanding between boy and raptor. When Constant slipped his fingers between Daine’s to touch the hawk’s feathers, now he felt it. Just a flicker, but it was there. Something that responded to whatever was inside Constant that let him know the hawks as he knew himself. Maybe he was doing this wrong. Maybe, instead of trying to reach just Daine, he should be trying to reach them _both._ He felt sure the book was the key. It had worked before, or something like it. He remembered watching Don and Sav talk Daine back from being caught up with hounds once, using a story about Don’s cats. Daine loved cats, when she wasn’t afraid of them turning her mad. She’d love this book too.

Constant closed his fingers tight through Daine’s, made sure he was touching the hawk too, and – with his awareness of their beating hearts ringing powerfully through everything he was – he once again began to describe the anatomy of the hare.


	5. Briefly, in the Quiet…

_He floated in the dark for an untold time, too tired to imagine there was anything other than this. There was someone else’s magic suffocating him, clinging to every inch of his shredded soul. It was a comforting magic despite how overwhelming it was. An intellectual curiosity that felt familiar stirred deep within him, pulling him just barely back together as he raised his attention to examine where this magic was coming from._

_He came to and realised he was lost in his own mind, held together by this stranger’s feral power. It wasn’t the Gift as he knew it though. It wasn’t even wild magic as he’d seen it in others. It was something entirely new._

_He turned his weary attention towards the bearer._

_She was talking to him. He had the impression she’d been talking to him for some time now._

_“It’s not like anyone would notice if we let go,” she was saying. Her voice was tempestuous, furious, incipient. He was fascinated. “Who would care? You’re just like me, and I’m just a homeless bastard farm-girl from a town that tried to hunt me. Now we’re both stuck, and I don’t even know why I’m holding you. It’s cruel. I’m doing to you what Savigny does to me, keeping me here even though I’d rather be a horse or a rabbit or a bird or anything else other than what I am. Hawks don’t get kicked and beaten and starved. Hawks don’t get men sniffing around them wanting babies and bedding. Hawks don’t get sad when their mas get murdered, and they don’t worry about dragging their friends into their madness. They’re just hawks. I should let us both go. No one would miss us.”_

_I’d miss me, he thought to himself, but she didn’t seem to hear him and maybe what he’d thought weren’t actually words at all._

_He didn’t know who he was, anyway._

_“Maybe it’s too late for us both,” she said to him. “Maybe we’re already mad.”_

_Then she went quiet._

_He couldn’t bear the quiet. It scared him more than anything else, more than the dark he was lost in, more than the frantic beating of his animal heart, more than the threat of falling from this magic right into the Black God’s waiting hands. He began to fight it. He needed sound, needed life – even just a kind word. Something, **anything** , to tell him he wasn’t alone in this maddening void with no idea who or what he was, or where he was going, or if there’d ever be anything again but inimical silence. He wanted to scream to her to speak to him, to make him real; he wished more than anything that she’d call his name. But she wasn’t, and she couldn’t, and he’d never be real again._

_He found his voice, and he screamed because he was terrified._

_A hand took his. Not his wing, not his talon. His hand. His human hand._

_“You’re still here,” she said, wonderingly, her magic surging to hold them fast against the darkness. “Hello.”_

_He found his voice, which hurt. “Where are we?” he asked._

_He felt rather than saw her shrug. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I’ve been here before but I’ve never figured it out. It usually means the madness is getting me, again. I think I might have pulled you in too trying to save you. I’m sorry.”_

_He noted how she didn’t sound frightened or unhappy, just resigned. This was simply life to her, living in anticipation of this darkness returning._

_Whispers of his name lingered just out of reach. Though he grabbed for them, they remained elusive. Still, his mind raced._

_“How do we get out?” he asked. Unlike her, he was afraid. It would be terrible to be trapped here forever, and he’d always been uneasy with the concept of madness when applied to himself. Himself? Who was he? He was certain he had a name, or names …_

_“Sav’s always pulled me out before.”_

_When she said Sav’s name, he felt the rush of her feelings through the magic wrapped around him. Love, misery, guilt, grief. Fear and unhappiness. Loyalty and adoration. A complicated, heady mix. A familiar mix. Whoever he was, the man trapped inside the hawk, he had someone he felt similar about. Just as confused and hurting, except he felt disappointment where she felt loyal._

_He was afraid of his person where she was afraid for hers._

_Pushing that aside, he turned his attention to what was keeping them safe._

_A bubble of copper wild magic was what they were inside, he realised, completely untamed but content to hold them fast for now. It must be within her. Her magic had dragged her into the hawk mind and, through his shapeshifted form, pulled him in after. There’d be no escape for him unless she found her way free._

_He thought again about how she’d taken his hand. In the fear and the dark, she’d taken his hand and he’d become clearer._

_He needed to do the same for her before he unravelled completely._

_“I’m scared,” he admitted, feeling her wrap her magic closer as though she couldn’t help but want to comfort him. “I’ve studied so many forms of magic, but never anything like this. I don’t know how to help us from in here.”_

_She tensed._

_“You’re a mage.”_

_“Yes?” he said, but it was unsure. He must be. He’d just stated his experience with confidence, and surely he wouldn’t have …_

_Arram._

_“My name is Arram Draper,” he whispered to himself, over and over and over to try and hammer it in. He couldn’t lose himself to the hawk if he remembered this. He was born Arram Draper. His father was Yusaf Draper, his mother Kabidi Terrliz. His siblings, Pattel, Haran, Kerinna … his mind went blank._

_The panic began to return._

_Pattel, Haran, Kerinna. Arram. There were more. He was Arram. Wasn’t he?_

_“Is it?” said the woman with the feral magic, her voice shaking him out of the fright. “That’s not the name you told me.”_

_“I can’t remember my siblings,” he said, terrified. “I’ve lost them. I’m unwinding.”_

_“You’re being fair foolish. Of course you remember your siblings. I’ve never lost my ma, even when I’m mad. Sometimes that’s why I’m mad. You said your name was Numair.”_

_He stopped panicking, briefly, to consider that. It did sound familiar._

_She was still talking: “Numair Salmalín, which is a silly name, if you ask me. Arram Draper sounds more like a name a real person would have instead of a player telling magic tales.”_

_He was offended._

_“Numair is an excellent name,” he said – and remembered the rest of his siblings’ names. Adasa, Gellab, and Mattan. His name was Numair Salmalín, born Arram Draper, and he was a black robe mage who was about to be lost forever as a hawk if the untrained, untested wild mage holding them didn’t somehow figure out how to stop it from happening._

_“Constant?” she whispered suddenly, her attention turning outwards. Numair was confused before he felt it too. There was a third magic, not his or hers, and it was calling to them. He couldn’t quite focus on it though. It wasn’t reaching for him._

(The voice behind the new magic was saying, his pronunciation clumsy but efficient, “This note says the suprahamate process of the acromion is truly hook-shaped in rabbits and hares but blunted in cats.”)

_“The what?” she wondered, drifting closer to the voice which became louder as she went. Numair noted the world around them was lightening the closer she approached the voice reading to them from a book that wasn’t designed for casual reading. Numair could now hear his heartbeat, feel his body existing in reality. Excitement sparked._

_“The acromion is a bony process on the shoulder-blade,” Numair explained with casual disinterest, feeling her attention snap to him and stay latched. “He’s explaining how to tell the skeletal system of a hare apart from a cat when they’re surprisingly similar without the skulls.”_

_“Oh.”_

_There was a tense, almost anticipatory moment. Numair could feel her straining to hear more from the voice above them._

(“Lagomorphs with either compromised heart function or cranial thoracic masses can present with bilateral exophthalmos.”)

_Her attention switched back to Numair._

_“Rabbits and hares with bulging eyes can indicate an underlying heart condition,” he explained, breathing deep and feeling his chest move – his **human** chest. He knew how to breathe as a human now, a human with a human heart. He just needed her to drift that little bit closer and he could yank them both back into their right minds._

_“How do you know that?” she demanded of him, wheeling from listening to the boy tempting her with glorious knowledge and back to Numair, who she seemed almost annoyed at for knowing what the specific terminology meant. Numair, meanwhile, was thanking all the gods in existence for Lindhall Reed._

_“I used to heal,” he said with faux nonchalance. “You have to know anatomy to heal.”_

_She was quiet for a while, listening to the faraway coaxing of the boy. Numair took the time to rebuild the image of himself in his own mind in great detail, placing the muscular system of an adult male human over the skeletal build he’d been taught, adding nerves and organs in their correct places, reminding his body of how it should be rather than how it seemed inclined to stay. He wasn’t entirely certain if his physical form had returned to its human state outside of his consciousness without him realising, but determined that this was good exercise for his mind whether or not he was still a hawk. He also set aside for later consideration the knowledge that the boy was reaching them even in the darkest recesses of her mind, which had been skewed by the drag of her overwhelming desire for hawk shape combined with her overpowered magic. There was potential for great skill there in the boy, too._

_“I healed a horse once,” she said. Veralidaine, he reminded himself. Humans had names, and they were human. Then he attended to what she’d actually said and couldn’t hide his surprise, feeling her shrink smaller as she recognised the emotion for what it was._

_“You healed?” he asked. Then he thought about it some more. He’d never known wild magic to heal, but he’d never known wild magic like hers. Why not? “Then you could heal again. I could teach you.”_

_“It’s dangerous,” was her grim answer. “Look around – do you s’pose I want to end up back here again and again? This is all the magic does when it’s in me. Nothing so good as healing when it’s needful.”_

_“That’s just a matter of control. I can teach you control.” He heard himself laugh, a familiar, hesitant sound, but so human-shaped that he could cry with relief. “I know all about feeling out of control. Won’t you trust me?”_

_Her low, “No,” was unsurprising if also saddening._

_Above them, Constant’s voice was turning anxious, his magic sharpening with worry as his attempts came to null. Likely, he’d be at his limit while still bound by his brother’s Gift. If they were going to get free, it needed to be now before his tenuous reach failed._

_“Then won’t you trust him?” asked Numair, indicating the boy who reached so lovingly for her. “You asked who would miss you if you just let go – he would. If you give in now, he’s always going to remember losing you like this.”_

_“But it hurts to be human,” she wailed, her magic just as jagged as her cracking voice._

_“I know,” he said sadly. “I’m sorry.”_

_This time, when she reached for him, he met her midway, and_ woke up.


	6. Healing Hurts

Numair wished he’d died while fleeing Sinthya.

Everything hurt. Everything was awful. His arm, rebroken by being suddenly thrown back into the shape of a man, felt like he’d boiled the bones and replaced them still hot into his body. His lungs weren’t working properly. He was either too hot, too cold, or a confusing mix of both at the same time. The list of miseries he was persisting through felt endless. His head ached. There were visible bones under his skin that hadn’t been visible last month. He couldn’t stop rattling out streams of ridiculous coughs.

Just in general, existing was far harder than it had any right to be.

And he’d only been awake ten minutes so far.

Veralidaine was muttering sour things in his direction from where Constant was rubbing her back, her head propped between her knees. She’d partially shapeshifted while putting his mind back together. From what Numair could tell, it hadn’t agreed with her at all. Constant, however, was staring at Numair with his eyes huge with shock.

Idly, Numair wondered if it was because he was very naked. But it was only an idle thought. He was far too sore and sick to do anything about it except to pick uselessly at the sheet he was lying on as though to cover himself. The sheet remained stuck beneath his weight.

“You’re _not_ a hawk,” said Constant finally.

He sounded tremendously sad about this.

“No,” said Numair, making sure to sound as tortured and miserable as he felt. Constant looked alarmed. Veralidaine gave Numair a narrowed stare. Dialling his tone back to ‘meek’, Numair added, “Do you think I could have something to eat?”

“Uh,” came a voice from the doorway.

They all looked up.

“He’s not a hawk,” Constant said to his brother. His voice actually wobbled. “He’s a _man._ ”

Savigny’s gaze was locked firmly on Numair’s chest. He didn’t seem to know where to look, which Numair blamed on the fact that he’d just walked in to find a strange naked man on the same bed as the woman Savigny wanted to marry and his younger brother. Numair would stare too had he been in the other man’s fine boots.

“His name is Numair,” said Veralidaine. She was still looking unwell under the dirt covering her face, her mess of hair now with added feathers she’d shed when changing back to human.

At the sound of her voice, Savigny broke out of his shock and strode to her side of the bed, kneeling. His fingers rested briefly against her jaw. Numair looked away. That wasn’t for him to see, and he focused on trying to itemise what was wrong inside his body instead of listening to the small whispers passing between the presumed lovers.

His magic felt dull. He poked at it and was alarmed when it barely flickered. It wasn’t unusual for the Gift to respond to the state of the body it was housed in, but it had been a long time since he’d felt his so weary.

“Numair?” came Savigny’s deep voice, Numair looking at him. “Can you stand?”

Numair thought about that. Then he tried to sit up.

It was a mistake.

Waking up again was nicer. The room was warm and Numair was pleasantly groggy, implying he’d been given some form of pain assistance. He still hurt, but it was distant. For some unspecified amount of time, he drifted in a daze, the blankets wrapped around him the most comfortable blankets he’d ever experienced, the mattress below sublime, the masculine scent of the bed soothing …

He twitched properly awake and forced himself to look around, feeling a dull surprise when this examination of the room had his gaze meeting the grim stare of Savigny. It was easier to make out details of him now. When Numair had been a hawk, all he’d seen was the general impression of a man several shades darker than Numair himself, though now he was also able to appreciate that Savigny was an almost-skinny that suggested he stressed more than he ate and that his hair, which was soft and black and curled, was carefully ruffled to appear thoughtless. The man sat by the fire in a chair that hadn’t been there before Numair had taken his involuntary nap. He had a woollen blanket pulled over his knees and a sword propped within arm’s reach. He was watching Numair. He wasn’t speaking.

“Are you guarding me or guarding against me?” Numair rasped out. His throat was arid. It didn’t seem possible that he’d manage to speak freely ever again from it.

“You could be anyone,” Savigny answered in a low tone. He set aside what he was working on – it looked like knitting, but Numair couldn’t believe that it was – and stood, letting the blanket pool around his feet as he stepped out of it and walked towards the bed where Numair lay helpless. It was a small comfort that he didn’t bring the sword. “I wouldn’t risk my brother or Daine on a gamble that you’re benign.”

“And what did you plan to do if I mean you harm?” Numair asked before he could stop himself. He’d never been good at stalling his tongue.

“I have the Gift.”

Numair almost, but not quite, laughed. It wouldn’t be an appropriate reaction anyway. In the state he was in, Savigny would be perfectly able to disable him with even a mediocre Gift. A mediocre Gift would not be capable of suppressing Veralidaine’s wild magic as well as it had, though once again Numair was reminded of the strange way the rose Gift had settled into Daine’s copper magic. Something about it was hesitant, wrong. He didn’t know what though, and he wasn’t currently in a state to figure it out.

Savigny kneeled beside the bed, reaching for something. Numair went to sit up onto one arm so he could see clearer, only to realise that the arm he’d attempted to lean on was the one he’d rebroken changing back. Not even whatever he’d been given for the pain helped with that, Numair rolling onto his side and hissing out a cry that was barely muffled by his clenched teeth.

No pity visible in his flat expression, Savigny said nothing to Numair until Numair had stopped groaning to examine his splinted arm.

“Did you do this?” Numair asked of the splint and bandaging, which were expert. He couldn’t have done better.

“No,” was the short response. “Be quiet. You’re going to wake someone up.”

Numair glanced around, but they were alone. He doubted the house attached to this cavernous room was so small that there were numerous people nearby to be woken up by his very understandable cries of pain, but he wasn’t going to argue with the man whose bed he appeared to have stolen.

“Water,” Numair managed, closing his eyes. His lungs felt strange. The longer he was awake the stranger they felt, the thicker his breathing. He wanted to cough but knew that once he started he wouldn’t be able to stop.

“Not yet.”

Opening his eyes, Numair stared, betrayed. This man was as cold as his expression. Numair _was_ going to die here, dehydrated by this demon and his artful curls and sharp mouth.

Savigny relented, just slightly.

“Daine says to help you sit up as often as possible,” he explained, indicating that he’d approached to do just that. “She’s made something up to make you cough, to clear your lungs. If I give you food or water before doing that, you may be ill.”

Numair turned his attention inwards, managing to scrabble up the thinnest thread of his Gift and probing the source of the wet heaviness. It was lucky he was exhausted because the temptation to heal what he found was high. Prior experience told him how much of a mistake that would be, however, exhausted or not. The results of his attempts at healing since his Gift had grown were generally disastrous and always explosive.

“I think you should find a healer,” he wheezed, trying to take a deep breath to help dislodge the build-up that was lurking insidiously inside him. “Herb craft will only get you so far. I’m a mage. I give you my word I’ll reimburse you the coin.”

“That’s complicated right now,” was the quiet response. “You’re Tortallan, aren’t you? Does political news not cross the border? Or are we so benevolent a nation that Tortall feels safe in turning its eye from us?”

Numair switched his attention from his lungs to the man sitting before him, alarm sparking. Unrest in Galla was not a happy thing to discover, not with the fiefdom between Tortall and Galla currently manned by the treasonous lord of Sinthya. More information he had to fret about sending home as fast as he could.

“What news?” he asked before the rest of the questions he’d built up burst forth as well: “Is this Cría? Who are you? Who is Veralidaine? Why have you bound her magic? You do know your brother is a wild mage, don’t you? You must if you bound his magic, you’d have felt it. Why did you –?”

“I’m beginning to understand why Constant prefers you as a hawk,” muttered Savigny.

Numair scowled at him.

“Will you answer my questions?” Numair asked.

“No,” was the response.

“Why not?”

Savigny smiled but it wasn’t kind. It was very distant. It didn’t inspire humanity. “Because you won’t answer mine,” was his answer.

“You haven’t asked me any.”

“No, but it would be foolish to answer a foreign agent’s questions without first trusting that that agent is not a spy. I don’t believe you’re a fool, so I haven’t wasted my breath.”

“Is there a reason I shouldn’t trust you?” Numair asked carefully, breathing slow so he didn’t cough and miss the answer.

“I’m not a fool either,” said Savigny.

Savigny kept to his word to answer no questions, but when Numair woke next to find the boy, Constant, sitting beside his bed with a sketchbook and in danger of tipping paint all over Numair’s shoulder, his fortune changed. Constant seemed to have gotten over his despair at having his hawk replaced by a lowly human and was now just delighted to have a captive audience. In fact, he talked so fast and on such a wide range of rapid-fire topics that Numair was given the distinct feeling that Constant rarely had the opportunity to talk to other humans.

Repeating the questions Numair had initially aimed at Savigny netted a much different response. The city was confirmed as Cría. Constant went into such detail about the surrounding neighbourhood, the great fair, and every animal stabled, kennelled or kept within walking distance that there was little doubt of this being accurate. The brothers, Numair was told, were Savigny and Constant of Hartholm fief, which was five fiefs to the north of Cría and, from what Numair knew of the area, contained the extremely volatile pass to Scanra. The name Hartholm tickled Numair’s memory, but he couldn’t immediately place it and thus let it sit to ponder later, in the quiet.

“Our parents are dead so Savigny is Lord Regent until I’m of age next year,” Constant explained, eyes bright in the firelight. This information didn’t seem to unduly sadden him. “They were _murdered_.”

“I’m sorry,” said Numair quietly, but the boy shrugged that off.

“I barely knew them anyway,” he said. “I was only eight, and they were never home. Maman was the Queen’s Gift, so they were always with her. She’s dead now too and Donatien is king, but he doesn’t have anyone as his Gift because he and Sav are fighting. But he does have the most _amazing_ mews. He has a hawk that’s all white and she’s beautiful and her name is –”

Numair, who had been reaching for his mug of water, moved wrong and brought forth a furious racket of coughing. It slopped water from his mug onto his half-empty bowl, which Constant had slid towards him and Numair had fallen greedily upon only to find that he’d barely been able to stomach eight mouthfuls before feeling over-full. This distracted Constant from the topic of the hawk – thankfully – but also, unfortunately, away from the much more interesting information about his parents and the Gallan monarchy.

“Daine said you’d cough a lot because you were still as a hawk and that makes the lungs weaker, which means they partially collapsed,” Constant chattered at Numair as Numair struggled to retain control of his respiratory system. “She put herbs in your soup to help but now you’ve poured water on it, so I don’t know if that’s going to affect it. I should learn herb-craft. Do you know herbs? Are you a healer? You must be some kind of mage because you can turn into a hawk. Can you teach me? Will you become a hawk again? Your arm could be broken for _ages,_ because you’re old, and there aren’t many healers right now, because of Don –”

“Don, the King?” wheezed Numair, determined to get answers. His brain was racing. Did Constant mean Donatien of Alarie, a man whom Jon had briefly described to Numair as ‘recklessly divisive’? Why was Numair so alarmed about this information? What was he failing to remember?

Constant shrugged again. His idea of pertinent information was evidently not the same as Numair’s.

“Donatien d’Alarie,” said Constant, mouth quirking unhappily. “We haven’t seen him in a while. He used to visit, before the fighting.”

“Your brother does seem like the kind to be rude to a king,” said Numair.

Constant grinned, his unhappiness fading like it had never been.

“Oh, he _is_ ,” he said with pride. “He told Don that Don was the epitome of an infantile king, and Don was so furious. But now I can’t go see Ghostwing at the mews, so probably he shouldn’t have said that. And it’s not really fair, either. It’s not Don’s fault he inherited early, and, besides. Sav did too, and Eloise even earlier. I’ll be sixteen when I inherit Hartholm proper. Eloise was sixteen too! Her parents kept hounds, and I _love_ hounds. They were murdered too. Her parents, not the hounds. The hounds are still okay, thank Weiryn. Do you keep hounds?”

Numair coughed again. Constant paused to wait him out. Once again, Numair was struck by how Constant’s gossip failed to match his appearance and age; here was a chatter-brained boy in the body of an almost-man. Numair couldn’t imagine him a lord.

“You really bury the wheat in the chaff, don’t you?” said Numair, amused.

“What do you mean?” was Constant’s baffled reply. “The freckle hounds?”

“Sure,” said Numair. “Tell me more about the hounds.”

Numair was briefly both alone and awake during the mid-afternoon, a time which he used to take stock. If there were no healers available, then he was going to need to wait until his Gift recovered to heal himself. That was going to take longer without healing as all his resources went to regaining body mass and lung capacity. At the same time, he needed to get back to Tortall or, more likely, get a message back to Tortall seeing as his attempts to get up and walk had all ended much the same as the first had. His instincts told him to wait until he remembered what was bothering him about the Hartholms before informing them of his position in Jon’s court, and he didn’t know enough about the current state of Galla to request political assistance with returning home. Scrying felt out as an option right now as well, with his Gift how it was.

Underneath all of that, his brain was ticking over the new mystery Constant had served up to Numair piecemeal and only because he was already alert to danger from the northeast. Sinthya, the fief against the border, was compromised, and the Gallan king was twenty-two years old. He’d inherited the throne at eighteen, barely. The nobles closest to the throne, that Numair could gather, were also young and had inherited too early due to sudden violence. It felt alarmingly destabilising. Countries with young rulers survived so long as they had strong nobility loyal to those rulers; countries with young rulers, young nobles, and divisions among the ranks … they fell. Jon had to be aware but, then again, their attention for the last few years had been turned towards Carthak, not Galla. Foolish. A nation with weak neighbours was weakened itself.

Suddenly, Numair remembered where he knew the name ‘Hartholm’ from. Dieudonné of Hartholm had come to the University of Carthak once when Numair had been younger. Numair vaguely remembered him as a daunting man with long dark hair and a sneering mouth who hadn’t believed Numair was anywhere near as promising as his teachers had sworn he was. They’d flaunted Numair’s abilities to the man with Ozorne loitering nearby. Afterwards, Ozorne had explained it was because the Hartholms were Galla’s eyes and ears, among other things. Carthak had wanted Galla to know it was strong.

A relation of these Hartholms? Numair believed so.

Tread carefully, he warned himself. He was a Shadow Service agent in a country without a peace treaty with Tortall, and he was certain that the Hartholms, at least ten years ago, had been spies.

There was a soft tap at his door. Numair forced his way upright, grimacing at his arm as it jarred. It had been a long time since he’d been in a position where he was forced to tolerate the natural healing of a broken bone.

“If this is about the hounds,” he joked as the door opened, expecting Constant back. But it wasn’t. Something strange twinged deep in Numair’s chest as the girl, Veralidaine, slipped in. She was different than she had been.

“Hounds?” she asked curiously, moving towards him without fear.

He was struck dumb.

She had washed, though her hair was still a mess of matting that she’d tugged back and wrapped a scarf around to hide. Clean as she now was, he could see that her complexion was the washed-out greenish-white of someone naturally an olive tan who’d spent several hard months away from the sun. This close to her, he could see that she was tired and starved, and beautiful despite these things. She wore fine clothes, tailored for a man and so they sat quite strangely on her underfed frame, but a stark contrast to her worn hands and the bruised and battered skin Numair could see now there was no dirt to hide it. It was more than he could bear. Cruelty devastated him.

“I thought you were the boy,” he managed to explain through his ruin, finding the words despite his aching chest. He wanted so terribly to heal her. He wanted to treat the flea bites that littered her wrists and hands. He wanted to fix her magic before it killed her.

He wanted, he realised, to thank her for staying beside him in the dark.

Veralidaine laughed. It was a lovely sound, if cautious.

“Oh, Constant,” she said fondly. “There isn’t an animal in the Jewel that he doesn’t know, would you believe.”

“I’d believe it,” said Numair with passion. “I think I know them all too, now. Did you know the baker’s top mousing cat is going to have kittens? I have it on good authority they’re going to be spectacular.”

She laughed again even as she checked his soup and tsked her tongue at how little he’d eaten. Numair was embarrassed when she also checked the chamber pot he wasn’t sure he even had the energy to use. Though he was, quite frankly, relieved he hadn’t, she looked disapproving.

“My ma would say no waste is a bad thing,” she scolded him. “You’re not taking in enough.”

“I’ll thank you not to question my particulars,” he said. “A man must have some secrets, you know.”

She raised her eyebrows at him, mouth twitching.

“You’re just a fussy noble after all,” she said, almost to herself. “Shall I bow and call you Sir Hawk? I’ve seen those particulars, you know. Who do you think helped Savigny get you back into the bed when you tumbled down and almost cracked your silly head? It’s nonsense to get all shy now, ‘specially if I’m the best you’ve got for a healer.”

“Why is that?” He waited for her to indicate she didn’t know what he meant before clarifying. “Why isn’t there a healer available? This is the capital. You must have mages coming out of your ears if it’s anything like Tortall.”

“You want to be asking Sav that, not me.”

Her low voice was a pretty good sign that he shouldn’t push it, not with her. She was hurting. Much like Constant, pushing her where she didn’t want to go would do more damage than it would good – and Numair sensed that, unlike Constant, if he pushed Veralidaine, she’d simply flee. Then the badger would be after him for sure.

But he had an obligation to her safety, too.

“You know that you have powerful magic of your own. You reached down to pull me out of my hawk, and that was deliberate. There’s an awareness of your abilities there, if also a lack of control.”

Veralidaine was frozen, her shoulders stiff and her entire body poised. The terror in her eyes floored him.

“I mean you no harm,” he said hastily. “I promise, my interest in you is nothing more than altruistic, and somewhat academic. I’m a scholar. I’ve never seen magic, wild magic, that’s quite like yours and I’m fascinated by it. Beyond that, I’m worried that yours is doing you harm. I can help you.”

“No one can help me,” she said in an anxious fashion.

“Is there a danger here for magic users?” he asked, earning a choppy shrug from her. “If that’s a concern, I can teach you to hide your magic from others. I can teach Constant too.”

That got her attention.

“Constant _does_ have magic?” she asked. “I knew it. I told Sav he did, but Sav was determined it weren’t true. Constant’s fair clever with all animals, but the hawks? That’s more than clever. He knew there was a talon pox in the guardhouse mews before any of the birds even showed sores.”

There was no way Savigny didn’t know that his brother had magic even if he didn’t know the form, Numair knew. Not with the hack-job he’d done of binding and masking it. But he left that for another day. It wasn’t his business if this girl’s suitor was lying to her, though he planned to undo the binding on Veralidaine and Constant both before he was clear of this place. He’d speak to Savigny about it too, and how little Numair thought of those who messed with other peoples’ magic without their knowing consent.

“Veralidaine, let me help you,” he began.

“Daine,” she interrupted. When he paused, she continued, “I prefer Daine, please. Veralidaine is … awful.”

Numair thought it was lovely, but it wasn’t his place to argue.

“You saved my life, Daine. Let me save yours in return.”

“You mean it?” she asked. Her tone was suspicious, her eyes narrowed, her expression almost hopeful. Numair smiled at her, excited to see her warming up to him. It felt like he was taming a skittish stray cat or beaten dog, reaching out and earning their trust. “You’ll help me, however I ask?”

“Whatever you need,” he said eagerly.

His answer was a slow nod, that smile evening out into a stubborn expression that suggested she’d made up her mind. If he hadn’t felt so ill, he’d have preened. It was a lovely –

“Okay,” she said, interrupting his satisfaction. “Then I want you to cripple the magic. If you really want to help me then take it away. I never want to hear another animal again, ever. Can you do that?”

He stared at her, speechless. He didn’t know what to say.

This didn’t seem to surprise her.

“I didn’t think so,” she said coldly. “Then, Sir Hawk, I think you should keep your pretty noble ideas to yourself. I don’t need this magic, I don’t need Savigny – and I definitely don’t need you.”


	7. Of Bedrooms and Bathtubs

No opportunity to reach out to Tortall presented itself over the next week, and Numair hid his growing anxiety with a determination to stretch both his physical and magical reserves. Both were reluctant to recover. While he could now do several triumphant trips down the hall outside the room he was in and back before he had to ease himself down to breathe, his Gift was depressed. He poked at it constantly, trying to gauge what he’d be able to use it for. The erratically overpowered nature of his Gift was hardly helping with that. Trying to lift a tray with it almost laid him flat with exhaustion; lighting a candle from across the room had imploded the candle. Numair finally had to concede that his Gift was still too depleted for any big magic – or even moderate magic – but its nature still denied him the small uses other mages enjoyed.

His physical recovery was enough to allow him one pleasantry though. His baths were now his own. No more stilted conversation between him and Daine, who had still barely forgiven him for his refusal to stunt her magic as she sponged sweat from the majority of his body while carefully avoiding his sore arm. What he allowed her to sponge it from, anyway. Even wildly ill, he retained some decorum and kept his legs crossed.

On this day, he was sitting in a lukewarm bath in the small alcove off to the side of his sickroom, studying the still water as he idly focused on using it to scry. It was a half-hearted attempt to reach for Alanna, fixing the idea of the rose-decorated mirror that she always carried with her in his mind. Half of his attention was dawdling over the problem of Daine and her magic; the rest back in Tortall worrying about his friends. Daine wasn’t easily put aside even for his responsibilities, Numair knew. He’d seen the state of her magic, the danger she was in from it. Her safety was his responsibility too now.

His Gift stirred. The tepid water glittered once and, as Numair glanced down at it with surprise, flashed briefly with a glimpse of pine trees, sky, a horse’s flank – and then Alanna’s face, as wide and flat as the bath’s surface, staring up at him. There was a brief instant of shock for them both. Numair saw the relief in her silenced expression, followed by the confusion, and then the outrage.

He looked down at himself.

“Oops,” he said of his naked chest, reflexively trying to cover it with the arm he had propped up on the rim of the bath to keep the splint and bandaging out of the water. This simply gave her an excellent view of what he’d done to himself. 

He winced and tried to grab for the connection, to hold it in place. But she was already fading. As swiftly as he reached for his incipit Gift, it wasn’t swift enough to hold it. By the time he’d wrangled up the idea of a communication spell, she was gone. 

At least, he thought wearily to himself, she knew he was alive now. She’d be trying to reach back to him. It would halve the effort required by him to reach her.

He reached with his good arm for the bowl he’d used to wash his hair, now propped on the rim of the bath. It was copper and buffed to a high shine. If he held it below the surface of the water, it would ease the strain of scrying as he tried once more to reach her but now with the knowledge that he could. Arm outstretched, he leaned forward slightly, felt his fingers brush the bowl … and a wave of dizziness near tipped him into the water, only saving himself from a face full of bathwater by propping his knee up to catch himself on it. Enough, his Gift was saying.

Stubbornly, Numair said back to it: no.

Enough was when he said so and no sooner. He _would_ speak to Alanna.

He picked up the bowl, set it below the surface of the water on his lap, looped his arm around his knee to hold himself steady, and reached for his Gift again.

“Are you okay?”

Numair lurched up. From his hunched over position to sitting upright, it was too much for his poor dizzy head. Spots danced in front of his eyes as he heard bathwater slopping over the edge of the tub. Nothing this time caught him from slipping, banging his broken elbow on something solid as he squeaked down indecorously into the water with a bubbly yell.

A firm grip around Numair’s upper bicep hauled him from his graceless bathtub doom. He was dragged half out of the tub by his saviour, draping himself over the edge and spitting up water with sharp, shocked coughs. Water poured from his soaked bandages, the weight of them painful on the battered limb. Once he was certain he was alive and undrowned, he looked up, for some reason – he had no idea why – expecting Alanna to be standing there. Maybe it was the furious strength with which he’d been dragged out from under the water with since he associated furious strength with one irate Lady Knight. Or maybe it was accidentally scrying her into the bathwater that had her high on his mind.

Savigny was drenched from the abdomen up where he’d plunged his arm into the water to grab Numair. His fine grey tunic, embroidered in a restrained fashion with black silk, clung to him. Numair blinked. He focused. The embroidery was conceptual, he noticed, leaning back to realise the whole effect was an abstract raven in suggestive, feathered lines. There was _magic_ in it, more importantly, stitched into the fabric along with the silk. Whoever had made it had a prestigious Gift.

“Are you actually cracked?” demanded Savigny, shaking Numair’s good arm once. “Do you want to die? There are better ways than in my bathtub, I assure you.”

“Where did you obtain that tunic?” Numair asked, peering closer. “It’s fascinating. I can’t even pick one spell out from the rest, they’re all so intricately wound, and so beautifully. The maker must know you. There’s a lot of love in it.”

Silence met this, and he looked up to find Savigny speechless.

“I’d love to meet them,” added Numair. “They must be a master in their craft. I don’t know anyone in Tortall who could do such fine work.”

Savigny was shaking his head, incredulous. At least he’d let go of Numair’s arm, which Numair looked at, still feeling those fingers locked hard around it. It would bruise, certainly. And deservedly. Rueful, he fancied how furious he’d be if a student of his had pushed a recovering Gift so hard that they’d almost drowned in a bathtub from exhaustion. His other arm was torture. Existence was misery.

Savigny said, his tone sceptical, “Get up. I’m not nurse-maiding your bath, and you’ve proven yourself untrustworthy in standing bodies of water. I’m also claiming my room back. You may have a guest room.”

“Where did you sleep while I was in your bed?” asked Numair curiously.

“With Daine,” was the airy response, which Numair swiped away a small hint of unease, at least until Savigny added, “But Constant’s lured her back inside and I, for one, prefer my bed to the stables.”

“You sleep with her in the _stables?”_ Numair eased his way upright, stepping out of the bath and testing his balance while leaning against the tub before straightening. He was distracted by the thought of hay, and bugs, and _cold._

“She’s uncomfortable with enclosed spaces and I don’t like her out there alone,” said Savigny, his voice odd. Numair looked up.

Savigny was looking at him strangely.

“What?” Numair asked, feeling defensive when he saw the other man’s gaze drift. “You told me to get up.”

“There’s just a lot more of you than I expected,” said Savigny.

The silence following this statement was heavy with the weight of Numair’s growing amusement. Maybe it showed in his expression. 

With a flustered, “I just, you’re very tall,” Savigny stalked out of the room, dignity intact.

Numair, grinning, said, “I _bet._ ”

Numair carried this amusement with him right through getting dressed in the clothes Savigny had set aside for him, which were depressingly short in the arms and legs. The Gallan fashion tended towards long tunics meaning he at least wasn’t baring his belly. His wet bandages would have to wait until he found Daine to be redone, so he carefully eased the wide sleeves over them before looping the throbbing limb into a cloth sling Savigny had fashioned for him out of a torn-up sheet. The pants were tight enough that getting into them with one arm to help was a trial, but Numair managed artfully. It was better than asking for help.

Still mildly amused, Numair made his way out of the bedroom to nosy about in the hall. Savigny had vanished like an embarrassed cat, off to pretend nothing of note had happened. Ignoring the effort it took, Numair idled down the hall, peering into every open door he found on the pretence of looking for his new room and with half a mind of tracking down a mirror to finish the scrying he’d started as soon as he’d rested somewhat. There were a lot of open doors. Numair took this as a curiosity of Gallan housing, which seemed to consist of flamboyantly painted surfaces, many small alcoves and architectural ribs curving up to the vaulted ceiling, and rich wooden floors in intricate patterns. Despite the air of neglect this particular building had sunk into its bones, it was beautiful, and colourful, and very quiet.

It was while looking down at the curved patterns of the woodwork on the floor that Numair noticed the baskets. Each door in the hall was propped open with a wicker basket filled with various heavy objects, mostly rocks. The dust gathered around these curiosities was well-settled. They had been there a long time. There was even a door that Numair gathered was meant to lead to a hidden service entrance propped open in the same way as the bedrooms and sitting rooms, a dusty, unlit staircase sinking out of sight in the void it revealed.

Tempted to follow those stairs, Numair lingered. If he went down, he’d have to come up to return to his room. That was an alarming prospect. But Daine and her ability to fix his sodden bandages which were gently but determinedly soaking through his tunic might lay at the other end.

A distant clatter echoed down the hallway.

Numair reversed, moving towards the sound. He suspected, as he began turning corners to follow the sound, that he was going to be lost in very short order if he wasn’t already. But there was another clatter and a following thump. Numair turned from one dark and dusty inner hallway to find one lined to one side with windows taller than he was, paned with hundreds of squares of coloured glass. The afternoon light filtering through was hypnotic, colours dancing along with the shift of tree branches bumping against the outside panes.

There were only two doors down this hall, both open. Numair went to the closest one and peered in, struck by the sheer _decadence_ of the windows. It was distracting. He registered what looked like the dusty remains of a female child’s room, the drapes closed and the room sick with disuse, before he was drawn back to the windows. The one he was standing before was emblazoned with deep rose-hued ravens circling a white goshawk with its huge wings outspread. 

“Oh, hello,” said a voice. Numair tore his eyes away from the window to find a ruffled head poking out from the next room up, Constant peering at him. “I didn’t know you were up. Aren’t they glorious?”

He was looking at the windows; Numair agreed wholly. They _were_ glorious. Tortall’s architecture, though beautiful, was function over form. In a way, this reminded him of the idle beauty found in Carthak, though that train of thought hurt and he yanked his mind away from it.

“Come see my room!” Constant yelled, vanishing into the depths. Numair, for a lack of anything else to do, did so, walking to the doorway and leaning in with a wry hope that Constant had a seat of some sort within.

Then he forgot his exhaustion because what was within was not at all what he’d expected. If he hadn’t already known that Constant’s parents were dead and that he seemed entirely without supervision, this would have told him that as surely as Constant himself had. 

Every wall had been painted or papered with Constant’s drawings and sketches, strips of parchment peeling loose and pasted over the top of others. There were feathers stuck to many of them too, as well as what looked like pages stolen from books or notes in many different hands. It was a chaotic mess of colour and curiosity warring for Numair’s attention, and for a moment he was so lost in staring at the walls that he didn’t look further. 

Then, he did; he noticed the tumble of unwashed bed covers, and the plates piled on every surface, and the tottering stacks of well-loved books, and Constant himself with an expensive anatomy book leaned against a wardrobe with a broken door as he did he best to copy the picture within onto the wall in charcoal. Numair stepped further into the room, feeling bereft. It wasn’t the room of a starving child, at all. The bedding was rich as were the clothes strewn about, and Constant had plenty of frivolities. There were carved hawks and toys he surely must have grown out of secreted in the clutter. It shouldn’t have made Numair, who’d seen true deprivation in his life, so deeply sad. But it did.

The only calm point in this whirlwind of overgrown child was a single corner, beside the bed. Numair looked at that corner for some time. It was a shrine much as he’d seen in houses in Tortall, usually to the household god of choice, though this one was clearly homemade by someone with far clumsier hands than Constant now. A Constant of several years ago, perhaps. The god painted onto the roughly cut wooden figure within appeared to be a man, green-skinned and horned and with an even rougher bulge upon his arm that Numair suspected was a hawk of some kind, purely because of the context. It wasn’t a god he was familiar with. There was a well-burned candle in the cleared and dusted space around the wonky god’s badly hewn feet, and two framed paintings propped beside it.

“Are those your parents?” Numair asked of the larger painting, which seemed as though it had been pulled from a point of prominence elsewhere in the house and carted up here. The two people within stared sternly out at him, Numair studying the man from his memory of Carthak painted in oil upon it and already knowing the answer.

“Yeah,” said Constant without looking. “Come see the lungs on this stag – they’re so big! Where are the lungs in a hawk? Are they the same? Are your lungs bigger than mine? A stag’s lungs are bigger than a hare’s, and you’re a lot bigger than me.”

But Numair didn’t answer because he was staring at the other painting.

“Numair?” Constant bounced over the mess in his room to see what Numair was staring at, looking from Numair to the painting. “That’s me! Look how small I am.”

He wasn’t wrong. The oiled toddler clutched in his brother’s arms was very small, but so was his brother. It was hard for Numair to conceptualise the smiling boy with the man he’d seen shaking Constant so furiously. But it wasn’t the young Savigny, caught with a brush in better times, that was startling him to his bones. Nor was it the blonde boy loitering next to Sav with his smile so self-assured that Numair knew that he was a boy who’d never known a day of doubt.

It was the young girl pressed tight between them, her eyes worried even in oil. Those were the eyes he was fixated on.

The painter was very good. They’d gotten the blue-grey perfect. They’d caught the sadness too.

“Daine’s so pretty in that painting,” Constant said unsurely, caught between the painting and Numair as though he was trying to guess what had caught Numair’s eye. “I don’t remember her back then. I was too little. That used to be Sav’s painting until he and Don fought. I think Don gave it to him as a midwinter gift forever ago, so Sav was going to burn it until I took it back. It’s too nice to be burned.”

Numair blinked.

“That’s Donatien?” he asked, now looking at the blonde boy. “The king?”

Constant nodded.

“Daine knows the _king_?” Numair pressed even though the evidence of that was blatantly in front of him. The blonde boy – the crown prince of Galla, as he’d have been at the time – was even holding the hand of the curly-haired waif beside him. Sav’s arm curled back behind Daine to rest a lazy hand onto Don’s shoulder with easy familiarity. If Numair hadn’t known better, he’d have thought he was looking at a painting of four close siblings in a decidedly mixed-race family. 

“Of course,” was the amused response. “Daine lived at court with Don and Sav when she was my age, but Sav said she didn’t like it much so our parents brought her here instead. That’s her old room next door. I mean, it’s still her room, but she won’t use it anymore because she says it’s filled with ghosts. I _wish_. How excellent would ghosts be? They’d have so many stories.”

He looked, briefly, wistful.

Numair felt dazed, and confused, and hungry.

“Constant,” he said in his sternest voice, earning a baleful stare from the boy who’d probably never had anyone care enough about his behaviour to be stern with him. “I need to understand something. If we sit down, can you answer my questions _without_ becoming distracted? I promise, you can talk as much about hawks and hounds later as you wish, but after I’m done. Do you think you can do that?”

Constant looked at him for a while. Numair let him work through it at his own pace, until finally:

“Okay,” said Constant, sitting down among the debris of his childhood and leaning his chin against his knee.

Numair found Daine in the cavernously underused kitchens, sitting at a huge wooden table with herbs and pots and jars spread out around her. She was diligently labelling what she’d already made and setting the pots aside, but she stopped when she saw the state of his splinted arm.

“If you keep fooling with it, it’s going to set wrong,” she scolded him as he sat where she pointed and meekly offered the limb. “Then you’ll forever have an ache in it no healer can fix.”

He watched her slip over to the inbuilt pantry and emerge with fresh bandages. These were set next to him and, after a critical eye was cast over his arm, she vanished out of the room and left him to ponder her herb-craft. He wished he could use his Gift to boost her salves. They were already excellent; he could have made them incredible.

There was a sound of something wooden being shattered and she reappeared with a length of seemingly expensive wood. He stared at it. She stared right back.

“How old was the thing you just broke to make me a splint?” he asked, amused.

“Never you mind,” was the pert answer. “Arm on the table. Don’t whine. You’re too old to whine.”

He obeyed, even managing not to whine as she revealed his poor sore arm. It looked thin and bruised and swollen, Daine frowning over the spots around the breaks. She worked in silence, rubbing in a poultice that she selected from her collection of pots and setting a square of silk over top of that. Then a layer of bandage with the split over that, also wrapped to stop it splintering against his skin. Then more bandages until the limb was immobile.

Numair spoke first.

“I understand you now,” he said, earning a derisive sound from her that he ignored. “It must be terrible, to have built a life from nothing only to have it ripped away because your mind is turning against you.”

He looked up from examining his arm to find her rigid, fingers knotted tight against the leftover bandage she was holding.

“I think if I was you, I’d want the magic gone too,” he continued. “It hasn’t done you any good, or Constant. Or Savigny and Donatien. These people around you who are hurting and here’s you with all this terrible magic, doing nothing but making their hurts worse. If I were you, I’d want to grab at anything to make it stop hurting, forever.”

“I don’t need your pity,” she snapped.

“I’m not offering it,” he shot back. “But it’s not my pity that burns you so badly, is it? I find it hard to believe the boy you grew up alongside as a brother wants so badly to bed you that he’s chasing you into the slums to do so. And if it’s not wanting to bed you driving him so hard, what is it? Is it your perception of his pity that you’re trying to outrun?”

Her smile was derisive. “Oh, pardon my manners,” she mocked, shoving the pot away. “I guess it’s been bothering your pretty noble mind about why a marquis would want to marry a dirty bastard girl, hasn’t it? And now Constant’s flapped his mouth and you’ve got us all figured out, that Sav’s acting on pity and I’m the damsel needing to be save –”

“I think he loves you,” Numair suggested, “because I would if I were him. It’s not the marrying for bedding love, but it’s love just the same. I’m not close with my blood siblings, but I have those I grew up alongside whom I would have burned to save if I’d been given the choice.”

“I don’t know what Constant told you –”

“That his parents took you in. That you were happy here. That they died and left the three of you alone when none of you were ready for it. That your magic takes you away from him in much the same manner and that you don’t think you can stop it happening or from getting worse. It must be awful, seeing how much their parents dying hurt your boys, and now here’s you threatening to do just the same and leave them for good. I can’t imagine how that feels.”

Daine was furious, opening her mouth to lash him with the sharpest edge of her tongue, but Numair was determined to get in first. He needed to go home to Tortall, to his life there, but he needed to do what he could here too. He wasn’t the kind of man who could step out and let three lives collapse inward behind him, not when they’d been nothing but kind.

He said, “Constant also told me that you used to love animals. It must have hurt so much to send Cloud away. I’m sorry. I wish I could have been here to help you then.”

Daine froze. Her expression went from rancorous to horrified in a heartbeat before dissolving into anguish. She said nothing, which didn’t surprise him. Constant had warned him how devastating a memory that was, and Numair had used it as the killing blow. He truly was sorry for that, but it had to be done. If she wouldn’t let him in, how would he ever get through to her?

“You can send me away, refuse my help,” he said, meeting her gaze with his and holding it. “That’s within your right, just as it’s within mine to place boundaries upon what I’m willing to do for you. I won’t cripple you. But if you don’t let me help you, if I leave this place having done nothing for you because you’re too sore and proud to accept a genuine offer – who truly loses? I’ll continue with my life unimpeded, if saddened because I’ll know that somewhere you’re suffering and I cannot abide purposeless pain. But you, you’ll keep losing pieces of yourself with every year that passes, and you’ll subject those that love you to a grand view of your spectacular unravelling. Savigny, who discharged his entire staff so you could have privacy in your worst moments and sold all the animals Constant loves so your mind could be safe here, he’ll be there to see it. I’d like to see you tell him otherwise. Constant will see it –”

“He wouldn’t understand,” she whispered.

“I disagree,” said Numair. “I think he understands far more than you give him credit for. He’s just very, very good at pretending otherwise because remaining a child is far easier for him than growing up alone.”

“I think you should go back to bed,” said Daine. There was a loose, tangled curl falling from under her headscarf. Numair shoved away a brief, thrilling, and stupid temptation to tuck it back into place. “You look tired.”

He was tired. But he doubted that was why she was sending him away.

“Don’t be angry with Constant for talking to me,” he said, standing. “Above everything else, he worries about you. I hope you’ll think over what I’ve said. There are other ways to retain your mind.”

“And I wish you’d see what a mess magic makes of the world,” Daine snapped back. “My ma died despite it and I lost my home because of it, _twice_. What good is learning it better going to do? So I can know all the ways it will ruin me?”

Numair studied her for a moment.

“I plan to teach Constant,” he said finally, idly, even though he hadn’t planned this at all, really. He had to return to Tortall! But, here he was, distracting himself. “Perhaps you’ll sit in on those lessons.”

This earned a smile. It wasn’t a nice smile.

Uh oh, thought Numair.

“Oh, is that your plan? To tempt me by training Constant in your wickedness? I wish you luck with that. Better teachers than you have tried.”

There was a stony quiet between them. Numair tried, and failed, to think his way around it.

“Besides,” said Daine with satisfaction, reaching for the pestle and beginning to grind a root so violently that Numair was certain she was imagining his face at the end of it, “I’d like to hear how you plan to talk Savigny into this.”

Frustrated and reckless, Numair snapped, “I’ll simply teach him too!” and stalked away.

It was a pity there was a basket of rocks propping the kitchen door open as well. Her laughter followed him back to the terrible, never-ending stairs. Numair, knowing better than to call back for help and also knowing he’d over-reached, looked up at the top of the stairs where, somewhere in this blasted manor, his bedroom was, and he sighed.

He’d started this journey, so he had to commit to finishing it, no matter how much it hurt.

He began, slowly, to climb.


	8. The Black God’s Walk

There were no mirrors in the house that Numair could find, which Numair assumed was another by-product of Savigny trying to lure Daine home. He could use water – as evidenced with the bath – to scry, but a mirror would be easier, more reliable, and portable. Numair found himself rising with the sun to continue his explorations and ponder his options, having discovered that no one, not even Savigny who remained mostly absent, bothered him for doing so. Daine kept to the kitchens and Constant kept to himself. Numair was, for the most part, alone. 

Exploring alone was how he discovered that Constant also rose with the sun.

Numair found doors in an upper floor sitting room leading out to an ornate, uncovered balcony two days after his disastrous conversation with Daine. He hadn’t seen her, or Savigny, since. Constant had brought his meals, though with less chatter than usual.

The view over the balcony looked out over Galla, which was waking up. Chimneys were beginning to smoke and distant spires glittered with the new sun. Numair looked over the city, taking deep, careful breaths of the thin air. It made him cough, but he was thankful for it anyway.

“Would you like some juice?” Constant asked politely. Numair startled, wheeling around to look back and forth across the balcony. There was no one else there. “Up here.”

Numair turned, looking up. The boy was sitting on the roof, legs hooked around an ornamental ridge and with a tray of food balanced across his lap. From a quick scan of the wall, Numair could only imagine he’d gotten up there by flight.

“You’re going to fall,” said Numair, testing his Gift just in case. It responded cheerfully, if somewhat muted. It would catch Constant if he fell. Probably.

“I never have before,” was the calm response. Constant’s head vanished so that all that was visible of him were his booted feet hanging over the gutter. Numair heard a sigh drift down, then nothing.

The quiet was so unsettling that Numair gave in. There was no climbing up there with his arm, though. He tested his Gift again, and then wrapped it around himself and fed a careful amount into lifting himself onto the roof beside Constant, who gaped. It was worth the side-effects for that admiration, thought Numair as his lungs complained and his heart kicked into a gallop. Let the boy see magic wasn’t something to be repressed or feared. 

Landing, he yawned and – sinking a small hook of his Gift into the roof to hold himself there – draped himself onto the slate shingles beside Constant.

“You _are_ a mage,” said Constant, passing Numair his flask of juice and half a fruit roll. Numair accepted both, balancing the flask in his lap as he ate one-handed.

“I turned back from a hawk in front of you,” said Numair. “Was there a doubt?”

“Well, no. But then you didn’t do much after that except sleep and cough, so.” Constant shrugged, turning his attention back to the seed he was scattered on the slate tiles that made up the roof. Numair watched him do so. No birds landed to eat the seed. Numair could see flocks of pigeons on rooftops nearby but no bird had apparently _ever_ landed to eat the seed, judging by the small sprouts between tiles where seeds had stayed to thrive. Constant saw him watching and said, “They won’t come here. Sav put up wards to stop animals from straying in below, but that shouldn’t stop the birds. I think Daine scares them since I can tell that hawks don’t like her near them.”

“Oh,” said Numair. He didn’t know what to say to that yet. It needed further thought. “I didn’t realise Savigny was strong enough to set wards around this entire building.”

“Is it hard?” asked Constant.

“Not for me,” said Numair. He wasn’t bragging; just stating a fact. “But for others, yes. It can be. Warding is some of the first magic a student learns, especially when meditating. But the larger the ward and the more specific the purpose, the harder it is to maintain. Has Savigny been taught?”

Constant nodded. Up here, he didn’t seem as chaotic as he was inside. Or something was bothering him.

“Yeah. Sav was supposed to be Don’s Gift when Don was crowned, but that … didn’t last. He was trained to use his Gift by one of the greatest mages in Galla. I mean, aside from our parents. Of course, they _were_ the best.” 

He threw a violent handful of seed which bounced from the tiles and scattered on the balcony below.

“Didn’t save them though,” he said in a low voice.

They were quiet for a moment.

“I don’t think he did the wards,” added Constant, sneaking a glance at Numair from the side of his eye. Numair pretended to be focused on nothing but his fruit roll, nibbling daintily at it and letting the boy talk his way to the point. “He has a lot of mage friends I’m not supposed to know about. They’re dirty. Daine says you think I have magic.”

There it was.

“You do,” said Numair in a neutral tone. “It’s wild magic. A very rare, little-known form of magic that links you with animals. Your hawks, for example. You feel more from them than you do any other animal, don’t you?”

But Constant wasn’t ready to come to that yet.

“Wild magic,” he breathed, sounding terrified. “Like Daine?”

Bother, thought Numair. Of course no one in this household would think kindly of wild magic.

“Not quite like Daine,” he said carefully. “Hers is special, for reasons that I don’t quite understand just yet. Yours isn’t as strong, I don’t think, or as tangled up. That doesn’t mean you don’t need to be careful though. As you get older, it might not like being ignored. Magic likes to be used.”

“I’m not allowed to use magic in Cría. No one is. There are laws against that.”

“Is that why no healer could come for me?” Numair asked, earning a nod from Constant as he tore another fruit roll in half and gave some to Numair. “Where are they all?”

“Around, I guess. They’re allowed to live here. They just can’t use their magic. If they get caught by the Sniffers, they get arrested. It’s only a fine so it’s not terrible, but Daine says it hurts people from the Bog more because they don’t have the coin and their Gifts might be all they have to help them survive. Sav agrees. All his mage friends are from the Bog. That’s why he yelled at Don, which made things worse.”

“Worse how?” Numair’s mind was whirling. This must have been a new movement. There hadn’t been any travellers complaining of the restrictions on magic, not even Onua. 

“Well, Don said if nobles were just going to continue flaunting their Gifts because they had the coin, then he’d make sure they felt it too. Now it’s a ban from the city for nobles to use their Gifts.” Constant laughed, shrilly. “Sav was so angry. In front of everyone – Adel, me, Daine, Eloise, some of the knights – he told Don to do something … um, bodily … and then magicked Don’s hair green. Everyone just looked at him and he said to Don, well, aren’t you going to exile _me?_ I thought Don was going to throw him out the window.”

Numair wondered how well Jon would take one of them magicking his hair green during a political disagreement in front of all the nobles. Not well, he suspected. He decided not to recite this particular tale to Alanna, who seemed most likely to take inspiration from it.

“I presume you weren’t exiled,” he said, hiding his amusement since Constant seemed very alarmed by the story.

“Oh no, Sav was. Sav just ignored him. So, I guess he’s kinda breaking the law being here, but Don’s been overlooking it. That’s why Sav told him he’s infantile because he’d make laws but not follow them through when it was someone close to him. I mean, I’m not breaking the law. The writ is up in Sav’s office, stabbed to the wall with a knife. It only has Sav’s name on it banning him from the city for a year. I don’t know why we don’t go, really. We could go to Hartholm. That’s our land now and we owe it our presence. Adel says so.”

Numair chewed on his fruit roll. He couldn’t help but feel that with everything he learned, the more questions he had. And there was no deciding how to move forward with any of it until he’d contacted Tortall.

“Do you have a hand mirror I could borrow?” asked Numair.

Constant looked surprised at the abrupt change of topic, then thoughtful. “I don’t think so. Sav, maybe. I can ask?”

That wouldn’t be a good idea, Numair considered. If Savigny was mage-trained, he’d know mirrors were used for scrying, and he was already a suspicious sort. 

“I’d rather my own,” he mused, tugging a lock of his hair, which was loose and annoyingly framing his face. He longed to tie it back but hadn’t found anything to do so with yet. “This is a tragedy of a hairstyle. It’s a pity hawks very rarely carry coin.”

Constant laughed at that.

“I have coin,” he said, leaping up and scattering the rest of the seed below him as he went. Numair’s heart almost went too at the exuberance with which the boy went vertical, boots skidding on slate. For a moment, he’d forgotten they were on a roof, and now he slammed a hook of Gift into Constant as well to keep him from falling. Constant didn’t notice. “I’ll go to the market and buy one for you! The great fair is still going, if you didn’t know – it goes for _ages_ so even people from eons away can make it. I’d love to go again.”

The fair?

_Onua._

“You can’t go alone,” Numair said hurriedly. “Especially not carrying coin. Let me dress and I’ll accompany you.”

Constant gave him a level stare. Numair held his breath so he wouldn’t cough or wheeze.

“Let me talk to Adel,” Constant decided.

Numair discovered Adel to be a large, red-headed noble with a beard to put Myles to shame. Constant begged the use of his household’s cart for their adventure and Adel, in his finest brocade, had decided to accompany them out of – from what Numair could tell – sheer fondness for the boy. That was the only reason he could fathom for Adel heaving himself up into the dusty back of the cart, brushing hay idly from one leg of his opulent breeches. This man wore his wealth casually and lazily. Numair introduced himself as simply ‘Numair’, hoping that this man – who certainly ran in more political circles than Constant – hadn’t heard of the Tortallan king’s black robe mage. 

Despite this, Adel still eyed him for an uncomfortably long time. Since he wore his hair in what Numair was beginning to realise was a more typical Gallan style than Savigny and Constant’s short curls, long and tied back tight in a thong, this was a severe stare.

“You don’t breathe like a healthy man,” were Adel’s first words to Numair, turning that severe stare around onto the cart driver. “Ivo, get some furs for them both. Constant is hardly dressed for this weather.”

“Oh _no,_ I just want to go,” Constant grumbled from where he’d climbed up next to the driver to pet the horse. “Adel, must we? I’m not cold. And Numair wants to see the fair before it leaves!”

“It’s not going to take us a week to get there, furs or not.” Adel looked at Numair, incredible eyebrows raised. Numair felt intimidated by those brows. Raoul would be envious. “You do realise that this boy is playing the fool, don’t you?”

“Is he?” asked Numair mildly, looking at Constant.

Constant was grinning, expression guilty.

“Oh yes,” Adel assured him. “This is not out of love for his guest. Someone, and I can bet it would be one of those guards on the wall, has told our Constant that there’s a peddler of predatory birds come to Cría. A very established austringer, indeed. Barely a day the man’s been set up and here’s Constant wanting ever so innocently to buy a mirror and only one from the fair will do, of course.”

Constant was staring at Numair looking as though he was now worried Numair would end the whole expedition with this discovery. Numair wouldn’t have, but he was saved from having to reassure the boy by Adel’s wife appearing with a frown and a basket for them. She was as red-headed and stern as her husband, though she softened quite a bit when she glanced at Constant. The sternness came back when she looked at Numair.

“I think you should take more guards,” she said to Adel after a cursory glance at the cart and the single guard sitting astride his horse. “This feels reckless, taking just one.”

Numair peeked at the gateway of the yard they were in, seeing a sliver of the Hartholm’s walls across the street. From outside, it looked just as abandoned as the inside did. Those who passed it gave it a wide berth. Then he zoned back in.

She was being dismissed by her husband.

“Elspeth, please. This extrapolation of yours assumes that existing trends apply to us, which is unreasonable. I’m in no danger.”

“I’ll look after him, Ellie,” chirped Constant.

Elspeth smiled at Constant before leaning on the cart, closer to her husband’s ear. Numair saw a flicker of a cornflower blue Gift, and then sound around them abruptly muffled. Sharing the small cart space with the large man as he was, Numair was surrounded by the muffling spell, but everyone else – including Constant – was outside.

“What are you _doing,_ woman!?” Adel gasped, eyes widening. “We’re practically on the street, full view of the road!”

“That one’s a mage,” said Elspeth of Numair, narrowing her stare at him. “He should hear too if he’s the company Constant’s keeping these days. What makes you think those that did for his parents won’t be coming back to finish the job?”

She tilted her head in Constant’s direction, who hadn’t seemed to realise he couldn’t hear their conversation so engrossed he was with the horse.

“That was six years ago,” said Adel quietly.

“Certainly, but Savigny doesn’t have the eye of the king on him anymore, does he? If I was set on ending troublesome noble lines too guarded by the king to get close, well …”

She stopped there, but they’d gotten the message. Numair fidgeted. Adel seemed hopeful.

Then:

“Fine,” declared Elspeth, hiking up her heavy dress as the muffling spell briefly faded, “I’m coming too, then. Better a mage than a guard, anyway. Constant – go get my things. There’s a basket of buns in the kitchens, that’s a dear. Bring them all.”

Constant looked horrified by this; he was clearly distraught by further complications in his plan to get close to the bird peddler, but he leapt down and ran off. Numair, already wedged in quite neatly in the back of the cart, found himself scooting up further and offering his good arm to the lady, who accepted it and settled at her husband’s side. Adel, at least, looked resigned.

The spell returned.

“If I’d known you were going to invite yourself, I would have ordered the carriage,” said Adel.

“Nonsense. If it’s good enough for the miller, then it’s fine for me.” Elspeth beamed at Numair, who offered an uneasy smile of his own. “And this way I can do what I bet none of you useless men – yes, you, Adel, but that addle-headed Savigny as well – have done.”

Adel said, “And what is that, dear?”

Elspeth was still staring at Numair as she said this.

It made it so much more threatening.

“Interrogate this stranger,” she replied. “Numair, wasn’t it?”

Numair coughed meekly and said, “Oh, yes. Yes, it is. A very common name, I’ve found. Dime a dozen. Not like Elspeth, now that’s a lovely name. Very fitting for one such as yourself.”

“Ivo,” said Elspeth, immune to Numair’s charm, “teach Constant to drive the horses. We’d like privacy back here, thank you.”

Oh no, thought Numair.

As fascinated as Numair was with the city of Cría as they travelled at their voyeuristic pace through it, it was hard to appreciate with Elspeth there. She was dogged in her determination to catch him out as a potential danger, which was annoying at first and then – as Numair started watching her properly and saw how she’d switch from questioning him to mothering Constant in the same breath – endearing. 

“You say you were a street juggler in Tortall,” Elspeth was firing into Numair’s ear as, beside her, Adel sat up to point out a particularly interesting design of church. Numair, attempting to attend to both, felt cross-eyed. “That’s not much of a trade. How did you make coin? Were you a thief? I shan’t take kindly to you stealing from the Hartholms. Those boys have lost enough. Constant, don’t lean so far over the horse. You’ll fall behind her and she’ll kick you sillier than you already are.”

“She’d never kick me,” Constant called back, leaning forward further so he could more vigorously pat the horse’s swaying rump.

Adel, happily, was saying: “– of course, with the move towards the ‘gentle mother’ aspect of the Mother Goddess, many of the churches decided to have the statuettes veiled, which is why you can see disparities in the colouring of the stone –”

Numair just nodded. None of them seemed to need his input, just his attention.

“And what of Daine?” Elspeth demanded, Constant wheeling around to fix her with a nervous stare before turning his attention back to the horse. “What does she think of this stranger? She can be ever so odd about new people so I hardly think it’s sensible to bring one into the house.”

“Daine likes him,” Constant called back, which Numair thought was slightly stretching the definition of ‘like’.

“Daine’s back?” asked Adel, distracted from the churches.

This proclamation seemed to have, briefly, pulled Elspeth away from the topic of Numair as well.

“You didn’t tell us Daine was back,” she scolded Constant, who hunched his shoulders and didn’t look at them. “Is she well? Savigny said she was recuperating at Alaire fief with Solange.”

Constant didn’t answer, so Elspeth turned her focus back to Numair as they approached the inner gates.

“Poor Veralidaine,” she said, eyes too sharp for Numair’s comfort. “Dieudonné told us she had a wasting sickness when he took her in. You’d believe him, to see her then, I’ll tell you. All bones and skin and big, frightened eyes. It takes her away from us quite often and she always comes back skinnier than before, I don’t know. It makes you wonder what the healers in this city are even doing, even before their reckless exile.”

“Terrible,” murmured Numair, eyes on Constant, whose ears were burning red. A bad liar, it seemed. “Wasting sicknesses can be hard to circumvent, even by skilled healers.”

“True, but still. It’s a wonder she outlived Dieudonné and Rose.”

“Well now,” said Adel, “they hardly died naturally.”

They were being waved through the gates. The guards bowed to them as they went but that was all the fanfare they were given, the elegant surrounds of inner Cría immediately giving way to more robust but still fanciful merchant housing and upmarket shops. The streets were busier too, Constant abandoning his horse to hang over the edge and wave furiously to various animals he spotted and seemed to know. Numair, watching him, was surprised to see just how many _humans_ waved back. 

“What do you see, mage?” asked Elspeth. “Your attention wanders.”

“A beautiful city,” Numair said non-committedly. He still didn’t have a handle on her and so was stepping carefully. 

From the corner of his eye, he saw a glimmer of pale blue. The sounds of the city eased again.

“Ellie,” whispered Adel, whitening. 

“Be quiet, Adel. We talked about this. Numair, is that all you see? Beauty?”

Numair studied her for a heartbeat, trying to gauge what she was looking for from him, what she was hoping to find. Her green-grey stare didn’t waver. There was none of her husband’s idleness here. He looked, once again. There was Constant and Ivo at the front of the cart. The horse ambling along. The city moving around them. Nothing he hadn’t seen in cities all over the land, emulated similarly in every country with only superficial alterations. Then he looked closer.

As they travelled to the outskirts, he saw the huddles of wary travellers. He saw the odd boarded-up home, abandoned and left to the city to reclaim. He saw the way that the people on the street parted in throngs for the passing guard or soldier, closing behind them and watching them leave with cold, hard eyes.

“Ivo, take us south,” said Elspeth quietly, still watching Numair. Adel placed a hand over his mouth, almost nonchalantly. But Numair could see his eyes.

“Lady …” said Ivo, turning part way back.

Elspeth said, “I wish to pay my respects.”

“We do not have guards enough for the Bog,” said Adel in a soft, hoarse voice, muffled by his hand.

Elspeth said nothing.

They passed a second inner gate. At this one, they were stopped. The guards didn’t seem pleased about their decision to travel through, requesting they remain on the main arterial road. Still, they let them pass.

And Numair looked closer.

The poor region of every city held the same stories cupped within. Beggars and bandits; hungry children and starved dogs. Envious eyes turned to stare at Abel’s silks and Constant’s fine boots. Numair doubted Elspeth wanted him to pay attention and be sorry for the state of Cría’s poorest. Though perhaps she was the charitable type of noble, always with a pet cause firing up her heart, she felt to Numair much more incendiary. Provocative. Like Alanna, in her way, though harsher about it.

“Savigny is familiar with these streets,” said Elspeth carelessly, though Numair noted that she strengthened the muffling spell around Constant for this comment. Adel made a disapproving noise. “Rumour has it he frequents the kinds of cathouses you only get in these areas.”

“Rumour has a pointed nose and little sense,” said Adel. “That kind of talk is common.”

“Nevertheless, the Bog guards have handed him over the wall stinking of ale and back-alley beds more times than I care for, with him having responsibilities at home. That’s the state of Galla’s nobility, Numair.”

“I think that’s the state of most nobility anywhere,” said Numair with a calm smile that he knew wasn’t reaching his eyes. As amusing as it was that she was throwing Savigny down the river to do it, she was trying to shock him. Why? “They’re commonly known for misusing taxes and working girls.”

She waved that off with an irritated hand.

“Oh, the drink and the bedding, that’s one thing. Most do it because they’re male and rich and stupid. I wish our nobility were such. But they’re not, and Savigny is a prime example of it. They are, above all –”

“Young,” said Numair, looking at the doorway of the buildings they were passing, boarded with wood and slashed across with a furious burned X.

“Young,” confirmed Elspeth. “And grieving. This is a grieving city, sickening right down the middle, and anyone with sense can see it’s not natural. The Hartholms didn’t die old, nor the Silvains, nor the Tirels.”

“If he’s one of the king’s, this is chatter verging treason,” muttered Adel.

“He’s not,” said Elspeth before Numair could say anything. “The young king is terrified of mages. Does that sound strange to you, Master Numair? That our king should fear mages, raised as he was with the Hartholms, Galla’s finest mages and with Rose de Hartholm Gift to the Queen herself? Raised with a Gifted boy as his sworn lifelong companion? Even now, I hear his only trusted advisor is a mage, neutered as that one is. No. I think that if the boy king is turning against mages, it’s because he’s being made to. Don’t you?”

“The marked houses?” asked Numair.

“Mages who continued their trades following the bans and who were fined and publicly listed as deviant,” said Adel gloomily. “After the Queen’s murder, emotions were … high. It wasn’t hard for some to whip the rest up into a nasty kind of mind. Cría turns against itself in its misery.”

“Most of them healers who kept healing the people who then attacked them and drove them out for doing so,” said Elspeth. “Such cruelty. It’s accelerating. The feeling isn’t fading. We’re on the cusp of disaster, and the boy king is blind to the danger he’s putting his people in – let alone those he loves.”

She looked, now, at Constant.

“Why are you telling me these things?” was Numair’s question, as glad as he was for it. It was the clearest idea he’d gotten of the underlying feeling in Cría since arriving, even if the mechanisms behind the rift were still murky. Potentially, however, even more alarming; how would Tortall communicate with Galla to strengthen their shared border when needed if the Gallan king was terrified of mages, like Jon?

“It suits me to have an awareness spreading of just how manipulated current events are feeling,” said Elspeth. “And it suits me better to have the man staying with the Hartholms to be aware of how precarious a position those boys are in. Numair, if you take one thing from this expedition, it must be this: no natural force in this realm or the next was strong enough to pull Savigny from King Donatien’s side, and everyone in this country knew it. If they’re apart now, it’s because enemies of Galla want them so. That, to me, stinks of danger.”

“Divide and conquer,” said Adel, heavily and regretfully. 

The cart was slowing. Constant wasn’t paying attention to the horse anymore but looking ahead with his expression washed out. All Numair could see ahead was an oddly painted roadway leading south-east. The cart stopped. The muffling spell vanished. It left behind a deadened feeling that quietened all sound around them until Numair realised that it wasn’t the hangover from the spell – it was simply just quiet here. He looked at the nobles as Elspeth stepped from the cart. Adel stayed put.

“I don’t like this walk,” he said firmly. “Show the man if you want, but I’m staying here. Constant, stay with me.”

“I want to go,” said Constant. He was already down from the cart and drifting towards the corner. “I’ve never been. Sav says it’s grossly morbid and it scares Daine silly, so they never let me.”

Numair’s curiosity was up now. Though he intended to walk alongside Elspeth and Constant, his long legs and desire to _see_ pulled him ahead. Thus, he stepped onto the road alone.

From the outside, it was simply a bizarrely painted road with a distinct resemblance to the patchwork-painted clothing of the jesters that had fallen out of favour in Tortall over the last few decades, though less colourful. The road was immaculately paved with brick, painted in obscure patterns of stark black and small splashes of blinding white. The houses that lined the road were similarly immaculate. Painted the same. It was unsettling, and empty, and cold. As soon as Numair stepped onto the brick, he felt the cold.

And he felt the Gift.

The whole street was soaked in it. There had to be at least a dozen powerful Gifts here, wound together with artistry that left him stunned and impressed. When he shifted his vision to more closely examine those Gifts, he found them so entwined that it was impossible to tell one from the next. The entire black-and-white street glowed. He had to mute it, to deliberately stop seeing any Gift at all. It was simply too bright.

He moved towards one of those splashes of white where the Gift had been pooled the strongest, feeling it recognise his approach. Though he tensed, uncomfortable with the magic sunk into the stone acknowledging him so purposefully, there was no malice in it. Just recognition. So he touched it, stooping and letting his fingers brush the white-painted roadway.

Constant gasped. Numair did too, leaping back with one arm flung back to protect the boy from what his brain first recognised as a threat. A man built from orange Gift burst from the brick, arms thrown in the air as his body curled around as though he’d been casting before being struck down. Though he exploded into existence quickly, his vanishing was far slower: he fell in a tedious arc before sinking back into the stone. The Gift he’d left behind rippled outwards as it dispelled, and the street came alive with dozens, maybe even hundreds, of ghostly figures. 

The Gift-created figures, which Numair examined and found to be impressions caught in time that clever mages had trapped in the stone to be replayed whenever someone passed by, had no distinct human features. As they crowded the abandoned street with the tortured reminders of their deaths, Numair could wander among them and find that, despite their lack of identifying features, he knew them. There was a sense of the person who’d died there entombed in memory. 

One thing was certain, Numair thought as he went from impression to impression and wondered about the violence that had occurred here, this was beyond even him working alone. He could have made a handful of these impressions, perhaps, but they wouldn’t have lasted. These wouldn’t either. Unless the mages came back to replace these spells, they’d fade over the years. Maybe they were fading already.

“I hate this,” said Constant, appearing by his side and almost having one of the figures fall through him. Numair jolted. He’d forgotten his companions.

“It does feel like its purpose was to frighten instead of immortalise,” said Numair. The overall effect was grotesque and unhappy. No one could come here and feel peaceful. 

He took Constant’s shoulder and guided the boy towards Elspeth standing in the centre of the road studying a kneeling figure. Constant was shaking. Numair felt tired, and cold, and unwell. So many people had died here.

They came to Elspeth. Since he had his hand still on Constant’s thin shoulder, Numair felt the shudder that ripped through the boy as he skidded to a stop at the sight of the kneeling figure Elspeth was standing before. His magic writhed and he stumbled back into Numair, who steadied him, feeling the boy’s heart beating fast.

“Our Queen,” said Elspeth quietly.

Numair looked at the dead queen of Galla and tightened his arm around Constant. He couldn’t help but think of Jon, of how horrifying it would be to see his last impression in the living realms if it were such. The queen was on her knees; she was injured; she was staring up furiously at whoever had stood above her, someone not captured by the Gift that had snared her.

“A riot,” Numair realised, looking around at the chaos.

“The Queen would ride through the city to remind the people not to be afraid,” said Elspeth. “It was foolish but she was well-guarded, for the most part. No one would have ever gotten past her mages. Except the Hartholms, her mages, were dead by this point. The first nobles to fall, two years prior. And this day, that neutered mutt, Cole, he begged off. Stayed at the palace, sick, he said. Instead, he sent out his student. A single student mage. He’s over there with the prince – do you see them? The mages who built this place deigned to add them in despite their being alive, likely to remind the now-king of what he owes the mage who saved him.”

Numair walked where she pointed, finding two figures that alone among the mass stood upon stone painted a deep rose-pink. He assumed it was because these figures were still alive outside of this place. A man sprawled on the ground, trapped by the even more indistinct shape of a fallen horse. Twisted with terror and turned, halfway, towards the queen, his hand reaching for her. Another standing over him, a sword in one hand, his other outstretched. He was visibly hurt, one arm of his clothing in tatters and the skin below it burned. An arrow protruded from an uncanny angle just below his collarbone. Numair walked around until he could look into this figure’s face.

Constant came over, but he wasn’t looking up to the standing figure. Instead, he crouched, fingers hovering inches from the face of the fallen man.

“Don,” he whispered, sounding horrified. “The horse is _on_ him. He could have died _.”_

“He would have,” said Elspeth, coming up beside them and looking at the figure of Savigny, “but he was protected. And now he’s not. That, to me, feels very deliberate.”

Numair, standing there surrounded by the fading memories of the inglorious dead, couldn’t help but agree. As much as it wasn’t his problem, the internal conflicts of a foreign nation, looking around at the ghosts he knew that that was naïve. This street was a memorial to a wound that had been left untended in Galla for far too long. It was festering with every day that passed, the infection leeching deep into the people struggling to recover from it. And, if there was one thing that he remembered from his student healer days, it was this: infection, even the human kind, invariably spread to the limbs, and countries, around it.


	9. Old Friends; Grim Tidings

Numair suspected that the fair had lost its shine in the grim mood following their walk down the Black God’s street. Even Constant barely spoke as the cart drew up to deposit them among the throngs of people clustered within the temporary stalls cluttering the outskirts of Cría. The crowds were unruly, animals bellowing from their pens, artisans hollering for attention, entertainers capering for coin. Numair looked at the crowd from his seat half-off the cart and couldn’t help but shiver, seeing once more the figures bursting from the melancholy of the black-and-white painted street.

“Come on then,” Elspeth said to Constant, straightening his clothes for him and patting down his curls. Constant tolerated her affections with undue patience for his age. “We’ll go find you a mirror and a new coat, I think. That one is too short in the arms.”

“Take the boy to see the blessed birds,” called Adel from the cart where he seemed inclined to stay, propping a book on his knee and settling in. “We’ll never hear the end of it if you don’t.”

“ _After_ he’s spent some time being sensible.” Elspeth turned to Numair now. “Are you coming with us, mage?”

Numair wanted to search for Onua and he could hardly do that trudging from clothier to clothier with Elspeth and a half-grown boy who wanted to be elsewhere.

“I’d hate to slow you down on your quest,” Numair offered, adding a cheeky half-bow for her and a smile he knew was dazzling. It had certainly worked on plenty of ladies in the past. Elspeth just scrunched her mouth at him. “I’ll wander alone. I have a fancy to visit the horses, if Constant wants to come find me when he’s ready to see the birds.”

“Well, you won’t be hard to spot standing a head and a half above everyone else,” Elspeth relented. “Ivo, put that fur on him. Watch his arm. Mage, keep your chest warm. You’ll end up sick breathing this air by the sound of you.”

Numair consented to the fur, though he’d never been comfortable in animal skin. It was too cold to argue even with the sun beginning to gain strength overhead. He couldn’t help but wonder how many sables had suffered to give him the heavy overcoat, fingering the sleeve unhappily as he set out on his quest. He probably looked ridiculous too, in his too-small Gallan fashion. It was tailored tight and high with subtle slits in the outer linings designed to give him more flexibility without straining the fabric while showing off jarring flashes of the bright silken insets. Adding to this awkwardness was his arm in its homemade sling. How Onua would laugh to see him, with his old-lady coat, provocative pants, and loose hair. He’d never live it down. 

It took him longer than anticipated to weave his way through the crowds to get to where he could hear, and smell, horses. Unfortunately, he was an eye-catching sight as tall as he was, and the furs gave the illusion of money. Every stall attendant and busker that spotted him wanted his attention and his coin. 

By the time he made it to where the horses for sale were kept, he was panting. Despite the sweat dripping down his back, he was shivering. It wasn’t clothing made to wick moisture away from the body, likely since Savigny hadn’t known Numair intended to go out into the weather in it, so Numair was feeling decidedly damp. Boots heavy with mud making his leaden feet feel even heavier, he lumbered his way into the sodden corridors between horse pens, looking for any familiar face. There were none. Just a mess of strangers, masses of horses, barking dogs competing to be the loudest, the clink of coins and shrieks of children.

Now it was too hot. Numair slunk to the side of the crowd, finding a crate to sit on and closing his eyes, head spinning. This adventure of his, he considered, may have been a mistake.

A shadow fell overhead. Numair looked up, squinting as the sun blurred his vision. The figure who stood before him was at first two, then three, then one until they took a step to the side and blocked the light with their head. Numair saw them clearly. And he blinked.

“Juice,” said the person, offering Numair a flask which he had no choice but to accept, as ill as he felt. They watched him drink with their head cocked at an angle, bizarrely dressed in a patchwork outfit of knitted woollen squares stitched together. It looked as though they were wearing the combined amalgamation of at least seven different pieces of clothing. The stitching made Numair’s skin feel strange. Tingly. Where had he seen clothes that reminded him of this before? He was certain he hadn’t, not ever. So why did they feel so familiar?

Numair wasn’t even certain if he was talking to a man or a woman, so out of it he felt and so androgynous their features. It felt impolite to ask, so he just said, “Thank you,” and continued sipping from the flask. The stranger watched him with glass marble eyes, unsettlingly coloured. Numair couldn’t pick what colour. It seemed like every time he settled on one, he realised he was incorrect and they were actually another. Soft green, ghost grey, wolf yellow. He didn’t know.

Numair closed his eyes again, feinting weakness as alarm sparked at his sudden disorientation. Not the initial illness – that had been his own cursed fault for over-reaching – but how he felt now. This wasn’t natural. Breathing slowly, carefully, he let himself slip partway into the state he went into when meditating, though still with a tight grip on himself, and let his Gift probe at the person.

It told him little, but also more than he’d expected.

The person was alive with the Gift, but it wasn’t the Gift as Numair had seen it in a long time, not since university. It was pale and indistinct, yet strong despite that. It was woven into their clothes, into the patterns in the stitches and pulled in a cowl over their face. Everything Numair was seeing was an illusion, and an old one his Gift told him. It was an illusion over an illusion over an illusion. He doubted anyone had seen this person’s true face in years, if what he was sensing was correct.

He opened his eyes and looked up again at the person, who seemed unfazed by his feint. The disorientation pulled back. They’d gotten his attention. 

“And what does the great Tortallan mage make of little Nonny?” they asked with a layered smile, pale and thin-lipped on their current face. “Numair Salmalín, come to town. Fancy fancy. Does the Raven know this one’s true person? Perhaps I should tell her there’s an Owl in her lair, come to spook the chicks, steal the eggs, smash the nest.”

Numair went cold, the juice sticky on his tongue. Had he probed it for poison? He didn’t think so. Stupid, _stupid_.

The person leaned closer. They smelled, curiously, of honey and smoke. 

“The Whisper Man isn’t welcome in Galla,” they said coldly. “Nor his birdies. Unstick your tongue or I’ll unstick it for you, oh leggy bird. Are you a naughty limb crept over the border that I need to cut to bits and boil away? Or did an ill wind sweep you here unprovoked, a tired Owl looking for a branch to sleep on?”

“Stork, actually,” said Numair with the smile he’d used fleeing Carthak when travellers had expressed interest in him. It said many things but, predominantly, ‘I’m too silly a man to be suspicious’. The person eyed him, expression shuttered. “Owls aren’t particularly leggy compared to storks, unless you pull up their skirts. I think we can both agree that’s very rude.”

He gestured to his legs with a small chuckle, finishing the flask of juice off as though he didn’t have a care in the world. If it was poisoned, he’d do what he had to; for now, he needed to pull off oblivious pet mage. There was every chance that this ‘Nonny’, if that was the strange mage’s name, was simply aware that George used mages and academics in his spy networks and that they were ranked as Owls. That was far less secret than Numair’s own status. A strange mage and academic – especially one as notoriously entwined with the King’s Champion – showing up in Galla would cause suspicion if so, and suspicion could be dispelled.

“I don’t know a ‘whisper man’,” Numair added with an incautious shrug, “or anyone called ‘Raven’. Have you been smoking poppy? None for me, thanks. It makes my Gift go silly.”

The stranger studied him. Numair stood and made as though to give the flask back and thank them before walking away.

“Keep it,” said the stranger with their sibilant-nothing voice. “A memento of Cría. I suggest you flap right back to your home roost, strange mage, whether owl or stork. This is not a good season to be winged in Galla. I’ll even point you the right way and pat your feathered rump goodbye. See that?”

Numair looked where they pointed. Down a muddy corridor of horses and men, his vision narrowed against the crisp ice-blue sky: standards flapped angrily above with the slapping sound of distressed canvas. Among the Gallan staples of sinople green, sable black, and gueules red, flowers and crowns where Tortallans would display creatures and stripes in varying metal-hues and predominant blues, he saw a familiar crimson horse rearing in a sea of bronze. The standard of the Queen’s Riders.

_Onua._

But when he turned back to say thank you to the stranger, they were gone.

Uneasy, Numair pocketed the flask – with a rueful thought to the lines of his ludicrous outfit, which was not designed for wearers to actually utilise their pockets – and hurried towards the standard. It had seemed very close when the stranger had pointed to it, so nearby he could have described the small imperfections in the travel-worn flag. But once he started moving towards it, mud sucking rudely at his boots, he realised it was barely visible at all. In fact, to find his way to where he knew it loomed above, he had to dodge other standards, round corners, and circle staging areas for the sale of larger beasts. There was simply no way it would have been visible to him upon his crate. He tucked that away in his mind as well: there was a powerful mage in Cría. Dangerous? He didn’t know. They felt like they would be though.

By the time he reached it, he was dragging again, exhausted beyond reason and furious with his body. In the back of his mind, what drove him forward was a fantasy that he’d arrive and find Alanna waiting there too, Alanna and her fantastic healing hands. Maybe Jon too, to heal this awfulness even faster. And a hot drink and warm meal and a soft, perfect bed …

But the tent he stooped his way into was empty. The canvas flap under his hand was painted, again, with the Riders’ standard and the belongings within were definitely Onua’s sparse necessities, but no Onua waited. No Alanna, either. He leaned out and curious ponies stared back at him from the temporarily fenced paddock. He could see familiar glimmers of Onua’s Gift protecting the borders.

He’d just wait for Onua, he decided. She mustn’t be far. She wouldn’t leave the ponies for long. In the meantime, he’d sit down on the mat she had laid out on the floor of her tent, and he’d meditate until he felt better. A foolproof, productive plan, he was sure.

Numair woke up to a disconcertingly wet lap, looking down to find two sorrowful eyes gazing above the indecorous mess the creature’s saliva had made of him. When Numair tried to push the big head off, a growl that was friendly but nevertheless firm stalled him. Numair gave up and resigned himself to delicately patting the curly, grey fur available to his good hand. 

Distantly, he could hear a tail enthusiastically battering the rug they were lying on. 

“Hello, Tahoi,” he greeted the animal, who rumbled a greeting. The tail battered faster.

“I’m glad he recognised you,” drawled a wry voice above them, “because in _those_ clothes, I certainly didn’t.”

This time, when Numair pushed at Tahoi, the dog let him struggle up. As soon as Numair was upright, Tahoi returned his head to Numair’s lap and continued berating him with his expression. Onua stood by the door of the tent with her hands on her hips, clearly having just walked in judging from her mud-covered boots and sweat-and-dirt streaked face. All signs of having spent the day in the horse pens. Onua was nothing if not hands on. 

“Onua,” Numair croaked gladly. His heart was fit to burst from relief. Only now did it truly hit him how long he’d been from his home, and how scared he’d been that he’d never return. This was his first taste of normality since leaving Alanna’s company to investigate Sinthya, and he savoured it greedily. But, first: “Do you have water?”

Water was fetched and Onua crouched beside Numair as he sucked it down, her eyes bleak as they studied him.

“I know, the clothes aren’t flattering,” he teased when he had the breath to.

“You look terrible,” she replied, softly.

He looked down at himself, frowning at the damp spot Tahoi had left. “I know, but I didn’t exactly have anything of my own. I fled Sinthya in a … hurry. Have you heard from Alanna?” But, when he looked up, Onua was fixing him with a stare that was frustrated. “What?”

“I’m not talking about your clothes, fool,” she said, smacking his unbandaged arm very gently. “And, yes. Have you warded us?”

He was surprised to realise that no, he hadn’t. Judging from Onua’s raised eyebrows, she was too. While her protective circles were excellent, it was an unspoken agreement among them that if warding was to be done to protect state secrets, Numair was to do it. He must have been more tired than he’d thought to have not done it automatically.

Guiltily, he went to stand to draw the circle. Onua caught him with one hand, keeping him down. Numair was reminded that she was a strong woman; her one hand was enough to stop him being able to rise, even if he wanted to.

“I’ll do it,” she said, eyeing him still. He took the moment she was distracted to push Tahoi off and pull his knees up, leaning his chin on them and hugging one arm around his leg for balance. By the time she’d turned her attention back to him, he’d fixed a casual smile to his mouth and was watching her cheerfully. She continued without his input: “I’ve had her and George through my fire wanting me to keep an eye out for wayward mages and strange-looking hawks. When I pressed, they suggested you could be in the area since they’d lost contact with you at Sinthya. I wasn’t expecting you here though, I must say.”

“Sinthya –” he began, but she stalled him with another hand. 

“No point wasting scant breath telling your tale twice. Let me get the mirror. Tahoi, guard.”

Tahoi vanished out through the circle without scuffing the chalked marks, spelled to keep in noise not dogs. They could still hear sound from outside of it and Tahoi would warn them if anyone approached to peek through the flap of the tent.

Onua fetched a mirror Numair recognised, ostensibly a frivolous luxury she could pass off as being something a woman would desire to carry on the road. It could fold out into three larger hinged pieces and set to stand on any flat ground to create a panelled mirror much more appropriate for scrying to an audience. When shut, the glass was hidden on the inside, it was slimmer, and it could be slid into any long pack. Numair had helped design them several summers ago for each Rider group to carry with them if they had a scrying mage spare, personally setting strength and durability into each and every one. 

Onua didn’t prefer scrying with a mirror, though she was capable of it, and now she looked to Numair. His reach with a mirror was far longer than hers, though he envied her grasp of fire. The flickering gave him mild headaches. 

Numair closed his eyes and reached for Alanna.

“Of all the cursed, arrogant, tom-fooled –” was the snarled exclamation that warned him he’d succeeded in reaching her, opening his eyes and fixing the mirror with a smile that felt drowsy. Alanna stared back through the glass, outraged.

He cut her off before she could really build up into a rage.

“Alanna, you look positively glorious today,” he wheedled. “I love the new colour on your tunic. A lovely red.”

“It’s blood,” said Alanna.

Numair blinked and looked closer.

“Oh,” he said.

“It’s soup,” said Onua, barely smiling. “Alanna, stop teasing. He’s not well, look at the state of him.”

“ _Look at him_ ,” Alanna breathed. Her eyes narrowed. Numair recoiled. “I’m _looking_ and what I see is a bog-brained, addle-minded buffoon who _vanishes_ without a word for _weeks_ and then reappears scrying _in the bath,_ no explanation, no nothing, like a –”

She said something that made even Numair’s ears burn.

The mirror went silent, though Alanna was still visibly ranting at them.

“Numair,” said Onua sensibly, “if she finds out that you silenced her, she’s going to retaliate.”

“I’m in Galla,” Numair replied, “her reach isn’t that long.”

“That’s optimistic,” was Onua’s dire response.

Their view of Alanna’s fury was obscured for a fleeting moment, Numair feeling seasick as the mirror reflected it being moved into someone else’s hands. When Raoul of Goldenlake’s sedate face appeared instead of Alanna’s incensed one, his mouth moving wordlessly, Numair added sound back into the scrying spell. 

“– even I’m offended by that,” Raoul was saying to Alanna, whose voice could still be heard distantly muttering, before he turned his attention onto the mirror. “Mithros’ beard, what are you wearing? You look like a p –” He looked at Onua: “– player.”

“He looks obscene,” came Alanna’s muffled voice.

“I think he looks pretty,” Onua said with a coy look at Numair.

“ _Exactly_ ,” said Alanna.

Numair readjusted himself into the ridiculous clothes, feeling put out by their stares. “Anyway,” he said, “Sinthya. Jon needs to know – they’re dealing with Carthak.” 

“We know,” Raoul said. He had to lift his voice to drown out a fresh bout of inspired spluttering from Alanna. “Alanna had a small moment when you didn’t come back, especially when we scoured the surrounding area and didn’t find a hint of you. She was certain you’d been caught and subjected to torture in Sinthya’s dungeons.”

Numair flinched as he thought back to those tenuous hours before he’d fled as the hawk.

“That’s not far off what happened,” was his quiet response, seeing Raoul grimace as he extrapolated what Numair wasn’t saying from what he was. “Should I be concerned about this ‘small moment’?”

“No,” said Alanna.

“Probably,” said Raoul, cheerfully. “Regardless, Sinthya’s currently serving at the displeasure of his majesty’s justice after Alanna stormed said dungeons to retrieve you. As it happened, you weren’t there, which I said to Alanna would make her feel mighty daft –”

Alanna reappeared, nudging Raoul aside with her shoulder so they could both fit. She looked calmer. Not calm. But calmer. 

“Fortunately, I found ample evidence of Sinthya being a treasonous slug,” she said, mouth twisting. “And we had a harrier mage come in who found your blood. Numair …”

Her expression said it all: she was regretting agreeing with Jon to send him in alone.

“I’m fine,” he protested. “Really. I got caught, they poked me for a bit, and then attempted to drug me into submission. I panicked and shape-shifted. That was it. There was no extended torture.”

“Gods,” said Onua, shaking her head. She looked furious.

“You shape shifted into a hawk after they administered a man-sized amount of sedation to you?” Alanna asked.

Numair shrugged. If he spoke, she’d read into it.

She was reading into it anyway.

“You should have hit him harder,” Raoul said to Alanna, who scrubbed at the spot on her tunic and glanced away. Numair knew why; Alanna wasn’t one to flaunt her emotions, unless those emotions were on the ‘I find this feeling acceptable’ scale she kept in her head. Regret and guilt sat unsteadily on her firm shoulders, but she’d never let him absolve her of their weight. “Onua, where are you both now? Alanna said she had a brief flash of Numair …”

He trailed off.

“Bathing,” said Alanna. Her voice was _arid._

Numair beamed at her.

“Bathing,” said Raoul, eyebrows up. Numair beamed at him too. “Yes. Well, there was no telling where he was. Numair?”

“Cría,” said Numair and Onua as one, the other two exchanging a glance of surprise. Numair continued, “I was confused and unwell and injured and there were Stormwings after me, so I got turned around. Next thing I knew, I was here, trapped in my hawk form. I could … should … have died, but I was assisted.”

“Good,” said Alanna. Numair could tell she wasn’t fully listening anymore, her attention turned elsewhere. “Well, ride home with Onua and Jon will no doubt want a full report on Sinthya when you return. I can’t fathom why Ozorne was dealing with a fief so far from the port. There isn’t even river access from the ocean to there. What on earth is his plan?”

“Galla,” said Numair.

They looked at him again, Numair swallowing as he realised they weren’t going to like what he said next at all.

“Ozorne is working to weaken the border between Tortall and Galla,” he said, thinking of Elspeth’s warnings. “There are forces here working against the current king, and if Galla falls and Sinthya is weak …”

“We’d have an open flank,” Raoul said, going still as he considered the implications. “We’d lose Sinthya for sure, and the mountains. They could sweep Goldenlake from there without blunting themselves against our borders. Nothing but Tirragen at our back.”

“Then Naxen,” said Alanna grimly. “And a straight shot to the heart of Corus. We’re not built to withstand aggression from Galla, not for centuries. How weak is Galla?”

They looked to Numair, who frowned. It looked as though he wasn’t the only one with a blind spot to their high north-eastern border.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “It’s unsettled, that’s certain. They have a new king and he’s young and contentious. The old queen was murdered which almost always leads to civil unrest, and they’re losing nobles too. The ones I’ve met have been ill-suited to their command.”

“I remember the queen’s murder,” said Alanna, Raoul nodding too. Onua shrugged. “Jon considered renewing an old treaty with Galla, but he didn’t have a good handle on the new king and we didn’t have enough eyes on him to change that. Jon didn’t seem impressed with him, anyway. Numair, I can already tell what you’re planning and the answer is _no._ ”

Eyes on him again, Numair had no choice but to fess up. Alanna knew him too well for him not to.

“I have to stay,” he said, meeting her violet gaze without buckling. “I’m sorry, Alanna. You’ve just pointed out why it’s important for us to have eyes in Galla, and I’m already here. It doesn’t make sense to extract me and struggle to put someone else in.”

“You’re sick!” she snapped. Tetchier than usual, Numair noted. Something must be upsetting her. “Oh, don’t give me that look, you can all see it. He’s skinny as a whip and his colour is wrong. And his arm! I can’t fathom why he hasn’t been to a healer yet, but we’re not leaving him –”

“There aren’t any,” said Numair. Silence fell, shocked. “They’ve been run out Cría, all of them. Any that remain are in hiding, as per King Donatien’s lawful decree. The Gift is outlawed in Galla which means no healers, which means no healing. I can’t even imagine what’s happened to the university or the temple mages. The feeling here is … inchoate. Something is building and I think it serves only Ozorne if we let it spark up unmolested.” 

They were quiet as they digested that. Alanna’s stare never left Numair. He did his best to exude feelings of good health, thought he doubted he was fooling her.

“Then Numair’s right,” said Raoul finally. “We need to move to shore up the border, though preferably we don’t want to be hit against that stretch anyway. It’s cursed cold for an army to perch up there for months waiting for something that might not happen. You’ll end up with a static force devouring resources and jumping at ghosts – and if we’re locking forces inland, we’re vulnerable along the coast to harrying. If we have Numair in Cría, we have a warning.”

Alanna bristled, but Onua cut her off.

“He can’t travel anyway,” she said with a glance at Numair that said ‘sorry but not really’. “Numair, your breath is whistling. I can hear it. We don’t take anyone out for a hard ride if their lungs sound like that because it’s asking for trouble further down the road. We’d have to tie you to your horse and then you’d end up pneumonic from sitting for the weeks it would take to get to Corus.”

“If I ride to meet him –” Alanna began but, this time, she stopped herself and looked resigned. “No, you’re right. It’s the most sensible option. I don’t _like_ it. But it’s sensible. We’ll have to get funds for you somehow. Back up as well, in case something goes awry. I want a healer within reach, at the very least. I’ll handle that.” She stopped, rubbing her eyes as though exhausted by this conversation. Numair related. He was feeling droopy again. “I’ll try to explain how to handle yourself until I can get someone there, if it’s your lungs. You’ll need to exercise daily and breathe deep _constantly._ Shallow breaths won’t help you. And if you’re still too long, they’ll congest, and then it’s the Black God’s gamble how well you come out. Do you understand?”

“Yes, mum,” said Numair dutifully, earning a half-hearted smirk from Raoul though it was clear his attention was divided. “Breathe, exercise, stay alive. A very hearty list for healthy living.”

“Don’t be pert. Is there anything else we need to know before we organise how to find you?”

Numair thought about it. There was a list as long as his arm on what he wanted to tell her, but he knew time was limited. Constant would surely be looking for him, and even he knew he was reaching his limit for active participation of the day. The mage, Nonny, and Numair’s strange rescuers would have to wait. Except …

“Yes,” he said. “I need to tell you about Daine.”


	10. The Inconvenient Immortal

Raoul left to organise his men and send word to Jon of what Numair had told them. Onua went to find Numair something to eat and drink, his throat hoarse from everything he’d had to cover in such a short time. This left Numair and Alanna, who were briefly together in silence – the mirror such a small, impassable barrier between them – before they spoke again.

“I’ll talk to George about these Hartholms,” Alanna said, Numair nodding tiredly. “It might be that the sons have little to do with their parents’ business, especially the young one. I don’t know much, but I do know that the Gallan spymaster was known to be a ruthless mage. George picked up a few sneaky tricks from him and taught them to our people after a couple of the birdies he sent over the border came back addled or in pieces, if at all.”

“The way Constant talks about his parents, they’d potentially fit that description. One or both of them.” Numair shrugged, his throat tight as the end of this tenuous connection to his home loomed closer. “This Nonny … their magic was very odd and they were definitely threatening. A hand of the Gallan spymaster?”

“Maybe. I’ll ask. If so, be careful. George knows they’ve got ways of turning the Gift against itself, and I suspect the more powerful the Gift the nastier those ways are. I really don’t like that this Nonny knew your name. They spoke of someone named Raven, did you say?”

Numair nodded.

Alanna looked frustrated. “It’s just too much we don’t know. You do understand that we can’t afford to lose you, don’t you? You’re too important to the realm.”

Numair fluttered his eyelashes at her just to tease. “Oh, Alanna,” he preened, “you _do_ love me. I’ve always wondered. Does your husband know?”

Her smile was acidic. “Don’t tempt me,” she warned. “It’d serve you right if George decided you were a threat to his marriage and left you there to eat bread and flirt for the rest of your years.”

Numair laughed. They both knew there wasn’t a man or woman in the world canny enough to weaken the love between the Lioness and her Rogue, but Alanna did like to mutter about it. However, his laugh was short-lived as reality reasserted itself.

“Numair,” said Alanna with the stiff tone of Alanna-about-to-emote. Numair’s heart choked on itself at the jab of panic that shot through him; Alanna only ever emoted when things were bad. “You know that I, I mean, George and I both … you damn well better come home. You’re important to us too. And you really do look like hell. I want someone with your colour in bed, not out spying.”

“Don’t be kind,” he begged her. “It makes things seem really terrible when you go all soft.”

“Fool,” she said, without venom.

“Thanks,” he replied, meaning it. “I needed that.”

Onua walked Numair towards where the stalls with the hunting hawks were, their steps slow as they approached their separation. Neither wanted to part despite the danger of being seen together, Numair more so than Onua since she was going home and he was not. Tahoi had stayed with the ponies. 

“Numair, I –” began Onua, turning to stop him with one gentle hand on his arm. 

They were interrupted. 

“Numair!” hollered a familiar voice, Constant hurtling from the crowd towards them. Numair didn’t know how he’d found them, but assumed he’d climbed something and peered around for Numair’s head above the crowd. “Numair, Numair, _Numair_.”

Onua raised her eyebrows at Numair.

“Constant of Hartholm,” said Numair with a thin smile. “Yes, hello. What have you done?”

Constant skidded up in a spray of mud, jittering about. “Who is this?” he said, glancing at Onua and then moving on without giving either of them time to respond: “You have to come _now_. I found the hawks and it’s _horrible_. Can’t you feel them!? Please come, quick, quick!”

He was almost in tears, grabbing Numair’s good hand and trying to drag him along. Numair planted his feet, half-turning to Onua.

“Slow down,” she scolded the boy, “and tell us. What hawks?”

“The austringer,” Constant wailed, turning a heart-broken expression onto Numair. “He’s _drugged_ them.”

Numair winced. People were looking, and he very much did not want to be the centre of attention. “That’s what many animal sellers do,” he said gently. It took some wrangling, but he managed to steer Constant into the shelter of a nearby stall, Onua lingering close. “It’s sometimes for the best, especially for beasts that don’t like crowds. Hawks can be delicate.”

“But they’re sick and hungry,” was Constant’s furious response. “I can’t even _bear_ how hungry they are. He doesn’t have to starve them!”

This was where Numair’s knowledge of hawks began to falter. He looked at Onua.

“Some bird handlers will do that,” she said. “It serves the buyer well to have the hawks starved at first so they’re desperate for food. There’s an idea that it makes the animal bond faster with the handler since they’re forced to accept hand feeding. It’s not illegal in Tortall, though Jon forbade the palace handlers from buying from anyone practicing it.”

Constant lowered his voice. “You’re a mage,” he hiss-whispered to Numair. “Can’t you stop him?! What good is magic if you can’t help anything with it?”

An uncomfortable memory twinged in the back of Numair’s mind. Savigny, he remembered, had faced the exact same accusation from the very same mouth. It was oddly upsetting for Numair to consider being thrown into the same will-not-help basket as Savigny in Constant’s mental organisation of the people in his life. It also didn’t bode well for getting both the boy and Daine to trust him, if the first time Constant came to him for help Numair shut him down.

“Show me where the hawks are,” he said with an airy nonchalance he didn’t feel. “I’ll talk to the man.”

Onua stayed with them as they followed Constant, who seemed barely able to tolerate Numair’s slow pace but didn’t press the issue. 

“What do you think you’re going to be able to do?” Onua asked Numair.

Numair shrugged. “Improvise?” he suggested.

Judging by her incredulous stare, this was not the answer she’d hoped for.

Constant skidded to a stop, Numair walking into him and biting back a curse as it jarred his arm. There was a stall ahead covered in racks of metal-wrought cages, backed by a heavy tent in the same fashion as Onua’s. The cages were ornate. Numair could see birds within them. Constan looked sick all the way through, his complexion ashen under his dark skin and his eyes beginning to glaze. Whatever was wrong with those birds, he was getting battered with it. It seemed like Savigny’s bindings weren’t protecting Constant from this, which only made Numair even more leery of what they actually _were_ doing.

“Your magic is letting you feel how sick the birds are,” he said to the boy, seeing him shudder. “You need to learn to control it. You’re not always going to be able to stop animals from suffering in ways that you can feel, and there are going to be times you may be exposed to that suffering and still need to be functional.”

“I’d rather just help them,” said Constant, gulping. Numair recognised the motion as one preceding Constant being sick and accepted a flask of water from Onua, passing it to the boy. When Constant was done drinking and looking moderately less unwell, he added, “All the lessons in the world didn’t help Daine ‘control’ her magic.”

“Daine didn’t have me as a teacher,” was Numair’s determined response. Onua’s eyebrows were up again. He ignored that. “But she does now, and so do you. Wait here.”

Filled with resolve, he marched – or as much as he could, all things considering – over to the stall. The seller was speaking with someone as Numair approached, allowing Numair time to examine the animals on display. They were clipped to their perches by delicate golden chains. He saw mostly hawks in an array of glorious colours, though there was one great white sea eagle and a small selection of fancy owls. Numair eyed them. Their feathers were glossy. They seemed a hearty weight with no visible injuries. The talons that they held onto their perches with were healthy and the only unhooded birds, the owls, slept peacefully with their heads tucked under their wings. None seemed sick. Even the cages were clean, with no more than a few hours’ worth of bird scum marking the bottoms. If they were drugged or spelled, which seemed likely as they were very quiet, it didn’t appear to be harming them. But Numair trusted Constant’s wild magic more than he did the carefully presented array of the man’s finest wares.

The seller had turned his attention to Numair. He was a broad man with lightly scarred arms and a harsh, wary face.

“My lord,” he said, with a short bow to Numair and a smile that was true enough, Numair supposed, if only because he was hoping for a sale. His accent was Scanran, though he was darker-haired than Numair was used to associating with the region. “Someone so attired, you must be here looking for a companion for the hunt. My birds are the finest –”

Numair affected his coldest drawl.

“These are not all of your beasts,” he said with a dissatisfied sniff at the closest bird, a falcon that drowsed. “Are they drugged? They’re positively torpid. I was led to believe you were the best austringer in the land, are you not? Or is that stall further on?”

“My lord! See here, this eagle? Why, wild-caught she was, right off the nest –” The man gestured grandly to the sea eagle. 

Numair snorted.

“A sea eagle,” he said, mocking. “What use is that? I wouldn’t even pay to have my arrows fletched with those fish-rotted feathers. “No gyrfalcons? No merlins?”

The man’s smile barely faltered.

“Of course, those birds would be illegal to sell to anyone below a duke,” the man simpered, bowing his head slightly. “I wouldn’t dare. Only a king may fly a gyr, even in Galla. See here instead, look at this owl –”

“Did you catch the owls wild too?” demanded a voice. Numair looked down to find Constant, righteously furious, now beside him. “They’re adults, well into their fifth year at least. What good is an adult owl to a hunter? Even trained young, they’re hard birds and an adult will never take to a human hand. All you’ve done is break breeding pairs apart.”

“I know my birds, son,” said the peddler. “There’s plenty of men desiring to fly owls.”

“And those men are _wrong_ ,” snapped Constant. “They’re following a stupid trend because they want to be pretty with something unique without caring about the animal’s feelings. Same with the fish eagle. She’s too old to fly for a human and selling her _inland_ is monstrous. You left her eggs to rot in the nest!”

“This boy is right,” said Numair, giving the man what he hoped was the kind of noble stare Jon could pull off at his most uppity. It seemed to work. The man twinged away. “Like I said, a useless, fancy selection. Nothing worth spending my time on. Are these the birds you sell to royalty? Or are you just a guardsman’s peddler, offering nothing but folly to people of ill breeding?”

“Of course not, my lord, if you’ll follow me.” The man gestured to his tent but shot Constant a dire look. “You, boy – get out.”

Constant swelled with indignation. Numair was fascinated to see a shade of the noble stare on his face, the first ever sign he’d gotten that Constant was aware of his high status.

“I want this one with me,” Numair demanded, pointing to the boy. The man went to snap something, but Numair talked over him. “He seems clever, something which I’m not convinced you are. Either he comes, or I and my gold do not.”

He thanked Savigny’s ridiculous clothing for allowing him this farce.

“Very well,” was the muttered response.

Constant hung close to Numair as they followed the man into the tent. Numair was tense at the first sight of the cages within, expecting hidden misery. But, even in here, all he found was fine cages and sedate, healthy birds. Admittedly, not ones the man should be selling without explicit royal orders, if Galla had the same hierarchy of birds as Tortall.

“You can see why I don’t risk these outside,” said the man, stopping to open a cage and adjust one of the birds within, a slim falcon that Numair recognised as being sacred to the Bazhir. Its feathers were ruffled unhappily and Constant, seeing it, bristled.

“That’s a desert bird,” said Numair of the Saker falcon. “Is it for sale here?”

“No,” said the man shortly with a scowl at Constant. “It’s much more valuable elsewhere, where it won’t die the first time someone flies it in the cold. I’m not a fool.”

“Sea eagle inland,” muttered Constant.

“The sea eagle is a useless bird for forest hunting. Only a fool would buy it anyway, and a fool would kill it just as quickly.” The man finished resettling the Saker and closed the cage.

Numair eyed the lock.

“A gyr, for you, my lord,” said the man, gesturing to a larger cage with the hooded white-and-black form of the royal falcon within. It was an extremely impressive bird. Numair approached and positioned himself where he could see Constant while presuming to examine the gyr. Constant was looking past the cages, to a curtained off section of the tent. 

“What’s back there?” Constant asked, voice shrill. “There’s something back there that’s wrong. I can feel it.”

The man looked startled.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, but shot forward despite that to try and usher Constant to the door. Constant resisted being ushered. Numair backed up several steps while the man was focused on Constant, who protested his manhandling, and tugged the curtain aside. More cages were hidden behind it, along with a silencing spell that took Numair a moment to shove away from his ears. Once it was away, he reeled. The shrieking was chaotic. The birds lashed their wings against the cages, biting at the bars. The man hadn’t ever bothered to hood or drug them to keep them calm judging by their injured wings and beaks. Numair couldn’t fathom why they were back here until he glanced down at the single cage set apart from the jumble and quickly backed out.

The man hadn’t noticed Numair straying and, Numair hoped, also hadn’t noticed the curtain swaying back into place. Constant had been evicted. As the man turned hopefully to Numair, Numair strode past, shaking his head.

“Too old,” he declared, though he honestly couldn’t tell. 

Leaving the man’s spluttering behind, Numair kept going until he found where Onua was lounging by the wild Constant.

“That man,” said Numair of the bird peddler, “has an Immortal back there.”

Onua straightened, eyes widening. Constant stilled.

“Is _that_ what I can feel?” Constant asked, trying to peer around Numair to the back of the stall. “It’s awful, whatever it is.”

“There are sick birds there too, which wouldn’t be helping,” said Numair thoughtfully, “but the worst of it might be from the creature. It’s nothing I’ve seen before. It’s like a hawk but its beak is metal, bronze, and its feathers … they’re not a Stormwings’ feathers, but they’re not normal either. I suspect the neglected birds are there to be fed to it. There was a dead kestrel in its cage.”

Constant’s eyes went so cold Numair could, for the first time, see that Savigny and his brother shared the same glare.

“What does it feel like?” Numair asked Constant, mostly because he was curious.

“Like metal clashing,” said Constant after a beat of thought. “If swords could scream, this would be the sound they make. It doesn’t speak, I can’t _speak_ to hawks, but I can always pick up feelings, and I’m not getting anything from the metal thoughts except screaming. I’ve felt it before, I think, when we were bringing you home. Something in the sky felt like this.”

“Did you?” asked Numair as he thought about what Constant was saying. “That’s interesting.”

“It was grosser last time,” said Constant, looking up again with a frown. “I don’t feel well. My head hurts from all the noise.”

Numair was reluctant to leave this be. It was a perfect way to show Constant that he wasn’t just another uncaring adult presence in his life, and he hadn’t liked seeing those sick birds either. They reminded him too much of Daine, especially the haunted stare of the Immortal hawk in its iron cage. Whatever the creature was, Numair knew enough gods to know that it was probably favoured by _someone_ who wouldn’t take kindly to its state once they found it.

“I can undo the cages with magic,” he said, “but Constant, you understand that only the birds that the man hasn’t drugged or chained will be able to fly away, don’t you? I can’t do anything for the rest of them.”

“The fish eagle …” Constant said, saddened.

“Is releasing an unknown Immortal into a crowded fair a good idea?” Onua asked.

“Sure,” said Numair, “I’ll make sure it flies off. Don’t worry.”

Onua gave him a look that promised trouble later.

Numair ignored it.

He closed his eyes and focused on the spell to unlock the cages all at once, knowing to do any less would be to invite his Gift to overwhelm the locks and potentially create more of a bang than he intended. All he wanted was the locks to open, and then Constant could call the birds within out, those that could. They’d fly free and Constant would be so pleased with this show of good magic that he’d agree to anything Numair asked. It was a flawed but potentially excellent plan, if, somehow, they executed it well.

“Wait,” hissed Constant, interrupting Numair’s focus right as the locks began to react to his Gift. “Sniffers!”

Too late. The locks went all at once, Numair feeling each one slide free with tangible force – and then his Gift caught on something that dragged at it, resisting Numair’s desire for it to _open_ before giving in and doing so. He was unsure what had done that. Had it been the Immortal’s cage? It hadn’t felt like it. It had felt more like a spell that had gotten tangled up with the locks, probably because it was wound around one of them. 

Whatever it was, it was open now.

Constant was pressing back. Numair followed his gaze and saw five guards with red Xs on their uniforms moving across a crowded square. Some of the crowd squeezed away to let them pass, the rest uncaring. The guards were armed with swords, one with a crossbow. They were mages, Numair noted, but mages with red thumbprints of some glowing spell pressed to their cheeks. 

“Calm down,” he said to Constant in a low voice. “They wouldn’t have felt that. I’ve masked my Gift from sharper minds than theirs.”

“Are you sure?” Constant asked. “Savigny says people get stupid around Sniffers if they start throwing their weight around. There are a lot of people here if they start a riot.”

“Does that happen often?” asked Onua.

“Often enough in the Bog,” said Constant unhappily. “Maybe they wouldn’t say anything to us anyway. They don’t really, if they see nobles using their Gifts. But there are a lot of travellers here who don’t know about them, so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad …”

Numair didn’t think that was accurate. Now that he knew to look, he could see that there were plenty of calculating stares watching the small group of guards. That crossbow was loaded. The tension was palpable. It was definitely time to leave.

“Can you tell the birds their cages are open?” he asked Constant, who frowned. “The guards won’t feel you. Wild magic is extremely hard to detect.”

“Savigny can tell when I’m using it,” Constant protested.

Numair eyed the rose-pink Gift wrapped around Constant’s magic. It didn’t seem to stop Constant feeling the birds, though he wondered if it would stop him being heard by them. “We’ll talk about that when we’re home,” he said. “But you should be able to speak so they can hear you, even if you don’t speak _to_ them, per se. They’ll understand your intent in calling them out. I think.”

“You _think_ ,” breathed Onua.

He nudged her.

“How will they escape the tent?” asked Constant.

“I’ll deal with that,” said Numair, grinning. He hoped to give the bird seller a fright.

Constant closed his eyes. His brow furrowed as though he was thinking hard, mouth tightening. Both Numair and Onua watched him with interest, Numair alone able to see the way the copper magic surged below the rose-pink Gift binding it, pressing against but not forcing the binding. 

Nothing happened for a moment.

Then Constant’s eyes shot open, and he took a frightened step back. “Mithros,” he breathed, “there’s something else in there?”

“What?” Numair looked at the tent, frowning. “I didn’t see –”

There was a racket of bird noises from within the tent and Numair, realising Constant must have done what he could before becoming distracted, summoned up a wind to violently toss open the flap. The man, startled, wheeled around to stare – and a dozen birds of various shapes and sizes launched out of the opening, barely avoiding crashing into each other as they flew to freedom. The initial surge was chaotic, cages sent flying by errant wings, people ducking as birds of prey swooped past, the man yelling. A few of the drugged birds’ cages toppled, Numair using his Gift to ensure they landed softly and feeling it begin to pull at his reserves. He didn’t have much to spare. 

Constant pointed. Numair followed his hand, seeing that he’d spotted the Immortal. It hadn’t gone far, landing on a nearby tentpole and peering around with its bronzed beak catching the sun in a bewildering fashion. Then it hunched its wings. Numair couldn’t see what it was looking at. He had planned to give it a short shock to encourage it to leave swiftly, but he didn’t want to do that unless he was certain it needed it. It might be capable of shocking him back.

“Oh _no_ ,” whispered Constant, his expression turning tight and his magic surging again under its bounds. “No, no, don’t. Don’t do it. Numair, it’s going to –”

Numair had seen. The sea eagle had hobbled out of its cage, knocked free by the fleeing birds. The peddler, trying to get the laughing guards to help him retrieve those birds which had landed nearby, hadn’t seen it. The eagle was still hooded and seemed disorientated, though the crowd had moved away so it wasn’t in danger of being kicked. Everyone was wary of those talons. 

The Immortal was lining itself up to swoop. 

“What is it _doing_?” Onua asked. “Why doesn’t it fly away!?”

“Immortals are singular beings, created with purpose,” Numair explained. “This one seems inclined to hunt.”

“No!” cried Constant, launching out of reach with dismaying speed and hurtling at the sea eagle. Numair couldn’t grab him in time, his hand closing on empty air. 

The Immortal leapt.

And Constant scooped up the sea eagle and turned with it, sheltering it with his body as the Immortal veered away last minute from its intended target to avoid striking the boy with those deadly talons. People gasped, pointing at the creature as it flapped up and idly landed nearby, turning its head to examine Constant with golden eyes.

Numair, who knew theoretically that the Immortal was probably – _probably_ – hawk enough to not want to hurt Constant, wheezed around his hammering heart. Startled was the politest word to describe how he felt about that fool heroism. And now people’s attention had been drawn to the Immortal, no doubt giving plenty of greedy eyes in the surging crowd a good look at the creature’s gleaming beak and strange, sharp feathers. 

Constant had turned to look at the Immortal too, cradling the unwieldy eagle in his arms. Numair sighed as he started towards the boy, noting how the eagle pressed its head against Constant’s chest, tucking those dangerous talons away from easily slashed skin. The drugs or Constant’s magic making it docile, he couldn’t tell, but either way it was going to be hellish to persuade Constant to put the eagle down so they could leave without getting into trouble for thieving. That, he was certain, was going to be the hardest part of getting out of here.

Then he saw a second, until this point unnoticed, Immortal crawling from the tent, beak open and squalling. Its small wings were mantled furiously. It was making a beeline for the closest comfort: Constant, who turned and stared at the baby griffin as it flopped helplessly towards him still wailing. 

Oh, thought Numair, _that_ was what the spell he’d accidentally loosened had been around. Something to contain the baby griffin. Or something to hide it? How interesting. He’d never seen one before. This might even have been the first one in the Mortal Realms in living memory, surely. 

Then his brain began functioning, and he remembered the most notable lore about griffins, and about their babies.

“Constant!” he roared, flinging himself towards the boy, “Don’t touch it!”

Something in the sky above screeched with triumphant fury. The baby griffin looked up and, in the tempestuous silence that followed the screech, cheeped. It was a very quiet sound.

Then a shadow fell upon them.

The crowd panicked immediately, which was an extremely appropriate reaction for a crowd of humans when an enormous silver-and-black griffin dropped from the sky where it had been hiding in the low clouds. The crowd also surged backwards from the baby griffin in a show of human survivability that Numair was both impressed and infuriated by, the second reaction mostly because the tightly-packed humanity around him had cut him off from Constant and Onua as effectively as a stone wall. Though he was taller than many of them, Constant was not, so the boy vanished below a seething mass of heads all trying to move unsuccessfully in one direction: away.

There was no avoiding Numair’s arm being jostled while trying to fight the human current, Numair astounded by just how many people there seemed to be around him now that they were crushed together instead of loosely scattered. He gritted his teeth against the pain and planted his feet, roaring Constant’s name in the dull hope he’d be heard over the griffin and the screaming.

A small girl tripped, disappearing for a second under the feet surrounding her. Numair dived, hauling her out with one hand and getting his broken arm kicked for his pains. The girl, terrified beyond reason, latched to his front via his sling and shrieked. Numair almost shrieked too, his vision momentarily going white. Then a hand grabbed his shoulder and dragged him sideways out of the worst of it, still with his armful of someone else’s screaming child.

Onua had leapt up onto a stall. She took the girl from Numair with a wince as she saw the way his arm was being dragged at. Though she was talking to him, he could barely hear her.

She leaned closer, Numair stooping so her mouth was near his ear, and bellowed, “There!”

Numair looked where she was pointing, spotting Constant hunkered down by the austringer’s stall, still with his armful of eagle and staring up, open-mouthed, at the surprising appearance of the adult griffin. He was surrounded by empty space broken by people who’d fallen and been trampled and now lay groaning in the mud. The crowd finally broke loose and began to either escape or pause a distance away to look back. 

The baby griffin was on its hind legs, begging for its parent with demanding cheeps. The parent was entirely focused upon it. Numair relaxed. The creature would take its stolen child back and then leave. No one seemed to have handled the baby Immortal, not even the peddler, so he doubted its parent would stay and risk the bristling human crowd just to scold them for theft.

He didn’t see who fired the crossbow bolt; he just saw the outcome.

The Immortal hawk with hilarious tenacity dived for the adult griffin’s huge back, the griffin wheeling around to hiss at it with a voice like slithering steel. The Immortal hawk, unperturbed by the fact that its intended prey was the size of a draft horse, screeched a proud challenge – and was swatted by one careless swipe. Numair almost laughed at the outraged tumble through the air the Immortal hawk was knocked into, righting itself and flapping away dizzy but unharmed. In the middle of the chaos, it was a brief and strange encounter. He dearly wanted to know more about the brain of a creature that decided the _griffin_ was appropriate prey.

Thus, he was as distracted as most of the crowd was, and only became aware something had gone wrong when a horrified ripple of gasps reached him.

He looked down. The baby griffin was no longer begging for its parent. It lay in a heap, small wings askew. Its beak was open with surprise. The crossbow bolt had struck one eye and embedded itself into the tiny, infant skull. Numair doubted it had even realised it was hurt before it died.

He hadn’t even seen who’d shot it.

The quiet that followed people realising was a dull, horrified, _fascinated_ quiet. It was the quiet of people who’d just seen some inevitable natural disaster rolling towards them, something as unstoppable as a wind tunnel or great ocean wave. It was the quiet of people who knew they were in danger.

“Onua,” said Numair with the same fascinated and vaguely traumatised calm, “run.”

He charged for Constant. He was very aware that as soon as the griffin parent looked away from its distracting friend, the Black God would soon follow.


	11. The Griffin Riots

He didn’t make it to Constant.

The griffin looked down.

If Numair had thought the screams before were loud, it was nothing compared to the creature’s tremendous bellow of pain and outrage at the sight of its dead child, followed by the sound of absolute human terror as it launched itself into the crowd that remained. People with extreme and rending violence. It was all Numair could do to avoid being accidentally guided towards the path of destruction the griffin was carving as it took its rage out on anyone within reach.

Numair found a safe place to the side of the panic, keeping the griffin in range as he planted his feet and began to wind a catchment spell to keep it away from those who were fleeing. People were beginning to fire back at the beast, arrows and crossbow bolts going awry and no doubt striking innocent fairgoers. The griffin was bleeding, though it was hard to tell what was its blood versus its victims as it howled with grief, red painting its feathers and coat. Arrows protruded from its wings. Numair wanted to wail at it to leave, that no amount of revenge would bring its baby back or make its inevitable death if it stayed worthwhile, but it couldn’t understand him. All he could do was hope to drive it away with his Gift.

Others got there first.

The air burst into brilliance as mages arrived, arranging themselves in a ring around the griffin and joining their Gifts together into a great, billowing spell that they pushed up. It bubbled around the griffin, forcing it to fly away from the crowd to avoid being trapped. Numair could see that it was pushing back with its own magic, but the organised collective of mages was too much.

Crumpling back against the stall he was tucked into, Numair caught his breath as it seemed, for a moment, that they would succeed in pushing it away long enough for the guards that were gathering to make the humans too great a threat for the griffin to keep flinging itself against. There was no sign of Onua or Constant among those left dead and injured that Numair could see, thankfully. It was this vantage point that let him notice something else he didn’t think he was supposed to; there were masked people among the crowd, opening up gaps in the stalls and leading people away. He saw two picking up an injured man and moving him back. They were keeping low and to the shadows, illusions rendering them invisible to most except as guiding hands but only serving to make them stand out more vividly to Numair. 

Uneasy now, Numair felt a hand touch his arm. He turned to find one of the masked people beside him. Their mask was a fox. It was intricately embroidered and made his eyes water with the amount of Gift stitched through it.

“You should leave now,” said fox-mask, their voice turned inhuman by the mask. “Follow me.”

Numair tensed. He looked back. The mages had tightened together as their spell looped around the griffin, which wheeled back and forth overhead, keening. Half of the group now had wary eyes on the guards. The guards, bristling with weapons and marked with those red thumbprints, were looking solely at the mages.

A glitter of light caught his eye and he looked up to find Stormwings flying in, making beelines for the destruction about to occur. He saw a couple of them change direction, flying over him and seeming to hover there, looking down. But they made no move towards him, and he pressed back harder into the stalls, his heart hammering. Did they recognise him or were they just here to revel in the fighting? He didn’t know, and he wasn’t eager to find out.

Looking to the griffin and the mages, he saw a guard lower a crossbow from aiming at the griffin to tentatively pointing in the direction of the mages. 

He saw the masked people moving through the shadows behind them.

“Go home,” said fox-mask, more forcefully. “Are you foreign? You must be. Anyone with sense knows how fast Cría ignites. There’ll be riots tonight.”

“Because of the griffin?” asked Numair, guilt biting for a second before good sense overtook it and reminded him that he wasn’t the one who’d shot the Immortal.

Fox-mask shrugged, turning and running away. Numair had no choice but to follow. To stay was to risk the Stormwings and his exhaustion, neither of which he was sure of.

Behind him, he heard the distinctive sound of crossbow bolt meeting flesh

Fox-mask led him unerringly through the rapidly emptying fair, now populated solely by traders who were held here by their cumbersome goods. Still, Numair saw plenty of them gathering their beasts and herding them out of Cría, knowing that there was nothing here worth staying for now. The distant sound of violence could be heard behind them, and the occasional scream of the griffin, but Numair didn’t look back. He had to find Constant and Elspeth, and Onua.

“Wait,” he panted to fox-mask. “The horse-trader, from Tortall. Do you know of her?”

Dispassionate eyes stared out at him through the mask.

“I need to know if she escaped unharmed,” said Numair. “You knew there was going to be violence between the mages and guards. Your people got citizens out before it could happen. You _must_ have some knowledge of who needed to be removed and who didn’t.”

Fox-mask shrugged, pointing out of the fair.

“There,” they said. “Now go.”

Then they were gone.

Numair swore, limping towards the gates into the outer rings of Cría where people were being roughly herded by guards. Numair could see people being dragged aside and searched by guards with their swords out, other people crying, frightened. 

A small hand slipped into his good one, Numair almost jerking his hand away before he looked down to see another child, this one a boy, holding it. The boy was gazing at the scrum by the gates, free thumb shoved into his mouth.

“Where are your parents?” Numair asked the child. He was beyond exhausted by this point, beginning to shiver as the full impact of the last hour caught up with him. He had a horrible feeling that the violence would have occurred whether he’d accidentally released the baby griffin or not, but the lack of mercy shown by whoever had deliberately shot it knowing the inevitable outcome … even after every act of cruelty he’d seen over his life, it still horrified him to his core.

The child looked up at him and smiled.

Numair went ice cold. He smelled smoke and honey. 

“This way,” said the child, tugging at Numair’s hand as he turned those wolf eyes away, their colour ever shifting. “Nonny already saved the boy you’re supposed to be responsible for, leggy mage. Why oh why wouldn’t you just leave? The griffin didn’t need to die.”

“Did you shoot it?” Numair asked Nonny, yanking his hand back and following the illusioned mage with the last of his strength. 

“No,” said Nonny shortly. “But they that did will be punished. Chaos for chaos’s sake catches too many unsuspecting toes. The Raven will not be pleased that good plans go so awry.”

“Good plans like inciting riots?” snapped Numair. He was in no mood to humour them. 

“Galla is a city founded from the blood of riots. It is a national pastime, how the mice express their displeasure with the master’s cats. There is much displeasure currently, and many cats. Here we are, a boy.”

Numair looked away from Nonny to spot Elspeth barrelling towards him, her expression distraught. 

“Good Gods, I thought we’d have to leave you behind,” she declared, looking him up and down to ensure he was in one piece. “Hurry up! We’re going home before they lock the Jewel. The whole Bog will be up before the end of the night if that mess spreads.”

“Constant?” asked Numair, letting her take his arm and drag him towards the cart where he could see Adel standing watch, ringed by city guards. These guards had no red marks on their cheeks, he noted, and their uniforms gleamed. They were guards from the Jewel, not the Bog, no doubt summoned to escort trapped nobles to safety.

Constant’s head popped up from inside the cart, the rest of him almost following when he saw Numair and tried to leap out to run to him. Adel caught him with practiced ease, shoving him back down. Numair heard a muffled shout of his name from the boy.

“He’s fine,” Elspeth said distractedly, looking around them. “Where did the girl go that was with you? We were going to take her back with us until we could contact her parents. Constant, where’s your friend?”

“I don’t know,” said Constant, popping back up as they approached. “She led me back to the cart and then I didn’t see her again until Numair – Numair! Are you okay?”

Numair looked around, but Nonny was gone. He hadn’t even seen them alter their illusion from the boy who’d taken Numair’s hand at the gate to the girl that Elspeth and Constant had seen. That was very unsettling. 

“I’m –” he began, intending to say that he was fine before a wave of exhaustion slammed him so hard that he almost pitched face-first into Elspeth. Fortunately, she saw it coming. Between her and Adel they hauled him into the cart where he crawled next to Constant and collapsed, wheezing. Constant patted him down, looking for wounds until a distant Elspeth scolded him.

The next thing Numair knew, the cart was moving and they were heading for home. Someone, he assumed one of the guards, had tossed a blanket over them and the three nobles and Numair were hunkering low under it, hidden from sight. It made everything very dreamlike to the exhausted Numair, filtering light through uneven weave to flicker across their worried faces.

A soft hiss roused him from his almost-unconscious state. He opened one bleary eye, finding a white head with beady black eyes watching him from inside Constant’s new coat. 

“Daine’s not going to like you,” Numair mumbled sleepily to the eagle, who hissed at him again and burrowed in deeper. Constant’s face bobbed into view, inches from Numair’s. Numair frowned at him. It didn’t dissuade the boy. 

“Don’t tell Daine or Sav, please,” Constant begged. “I’ll hide her really well and Daine will never know, I promise. I’ll keep her in my roof space and won’t let them _near_ each other. Are you sick? You’ve gone grey. I bought you a mirror.”

He offered a hand-mirror to Numair as though this offering would heal him. It was very sweet. Numair managed a smile, hearing Elspeth snap at Constant to keep his head down.

“Do you think the baby griffin is okay?” asked Constant. “Nonny pulled me away before I could see it fly away. It did fly away, didn’t it?”

It took Numair far too long to come up with an acceptable answer to that. Constant knew it.

“Oh,” he said softly. He hunkered back, looking down at his eagle. 

Elspeth, who hadn’t seemed to be listening to their conversation, proceeded to hiss-scold the boy in a low voice about him slipping away from her to go see the birds. Constant didn’t look up. 

Numair closed his eyes.

No furious Savigny was waiting to roar at them for sneaking out when they arrived home, Constant seeing Numair to the door and making sure he was okay to stumble his way to bed before scuttling off to hide his eagle. Elspeth and Adel didn’t invite themselves in, letting them out at the gate and instructing Constant to stay inside – with the gates barred – and Numair to go to bed.

“There’ll be a lockdown, no doubt,” Elspeth had said with a weary shake of her head. Numair had the distinct impression this was a common enough occurrence these days. “I’ll make sure someone brings some food over for you all before it sets in.”

Now Numair was left to trudge his way to his room, alone. The only thing he could be grateful for was that news of the fair hadn’t filtered this far into the city yet, and their absence had not been noted. Everything else served to exhaust him, especially his worry about Onua. 

So focused on his thoughts he was, it was only when he was almost there that he realised he’d walked himself automatically to Savigny’s room instead of his own. He paused, taking a moment to lean against the wall as he reorientated himself. He had no memory of taking the stairs or deciding to come this way; he’d just done it. It had been a long time since he’d been this fatigued.

Soft voices startled him out of his half-doze slumped against the wall. He blinked awake, recognising them as Daine and Savigny. They were nearby. He looked ahead, seeing light filtering from Savigny’s door which, much like every other door in this place, was propped open. They evidently didn’t know about the unrest yet. Their voices were calm. In fact, Numair had never heard Daine sound like this, nor Savigny. They sounded like they were … having fun.

“Ow,” he heard Daine snap, following with a soft laugh. “Do you mind? It’s attached.”

“I offered to cut it,” said Savigny in response, his tone amused. “Stay still.”

There was a fixed quiet, broken only by another ‘ow’.

“This is dumb,” said Daine, less amused now. “It’s taking hours. I’m being silly. Just get your knife, it’s not worth all this fuss.”

“Absolutely not,” Savigny said. Numair limped forward a few steps, curious despite his deep desire to curl up and sleep for a week. “Sometimes it takes time to get lovely things back to loveliness when they’ve been neglected for a long time.”

Daine was silent. 

“You’ll be as pretty as your hawk man by the time I’m done,” Savigny teased. This did earn him a rough laugh from Daine, as well as a grin from the eavesdropping Numair. 

“Oh, is _that_ why you’re letting him stay?” Daine teased back, cloth rustling within the room. Numair heard a clink of glass. It bemused him to imagine what was happening. “You’ve decided he’s a pretty thing so you’re keeping him to look at, like a bit of glitter. Shame on you.”

“Ridiculous. That’s ridiculous. Stop wiggling or I’m going to pull.” Sav fell quiet, before adding a soft – and shocking, to Numair at least – “Have you considered that I’m letting him stay because I think it could be … helpful … for you to learn from him?”

The silence that followed that had none of the playful fun. Numair clung to the wall, heart beating fast. Savigny was an ally in Numair’s battle to get Daine to allow him to help her? _That_ he hadn’t seen coming.

Daine didn’t seem like she was going to answer, so Savigny spoke again.

“He can shapeshift. We _saw_ him do it. At the least, he can teach you how to control yours. Maybe he can’t help the madness, maybe he can. Isn’t it worth a try? And if you’re right and what he said about Constant having the same magic as you is true, he can teach Constant too. I don’t … I don’t know what I’ll do if this magic takes both of you.”

“I can’t believe you’d trust a stranger with your brother’s mind and magic,” snapped Daine, now savage in her unhappiness. “You _know_ what a nasty-minded person can do when let loose on someone like that. How do you know he’s not cruel under all his flirt and pretty? How do you know he’s not a Cole?”

Numair winced at the quiet that followed that because, even to him, it hurt. Or maybe he was imagining things.

He definitely wasn’t imagining the threat in Savigny’s voice when he responded.

“ _Daine_ ,” was all he said. There was so much layered in that single word. Anger and hurt, warning and request.

“Sorry,” whispered Daine. Numair almost didn’t hear it.

They didn’t speak again.

Numair limped forward, catching the doorway and leaning in. He fixed a smile to his face that he hoped was dreamy instead of exhausted, keeping the most of his dirt-splattered clothes out of view. They didn’t see him straight away, so focused on their task they were. And their task … Numair’s heart choked at their task.

Daine was kneeling between Savigny’s legs in front of the fire, Savigny seated on a low stool as he gently picked out the worst of the knots in her matted mess of hair. There were glass bottles scattered on a tray beside him, which he was liberally applying the contents to sections of her hair before working at it. Oil, Numair assumed, to assist in detangling. A towel was looped around Daine’s shoulders, Savigny’s hands slick in the flickering light from the fire. They must have already been here for some time, explaining why they hadn’t noticed Numair or Constant’s absence. Almost one half of Daine’s hair was combed out, prickly with fuzz as the curls protested being combed but otherwise clean and unknotted.

“There are spells to assist with that,” Numair said hoarsely. Anything else he’d been going to say had fled in the face of his surprise. Whatever he’d been expecting, it hadn’t been this. Both inhabitants of the room looked up at him, Savigny’s face expressionless and Daine’s eyes red-rimmed. “I’m too tired to show them to you now, but I can teach Savigny when I wake up if you’d like. They’ll pull less than manually combing will, and leave you with fewer splits in the hair. You’ll still need to trim it though.”

Savigny looked at Daine, letting her answer.

Daine just shrugged. “Maybe,” she said, without committing. “Why are you so dirty? What have you been doing?”

“Fooling around outside with Constant,” Numair hazarded. It was a good half-lie. Neither of them seemed to disbelieve him, Savigny muttering something and Daine rolling her eyes with a tight smile.

“If you get sicker, you deserve it,” scolded Daine.

“Yes, Mother Daine,” said Numair. He beamed the best smile he felt able to manage right now. “You can scold me proper when I’ve woken up. Good day.”

He slipped away, deciding to talk to them both when he woke up. A chink in their collective armour had appeared; now, he could see his way in.

But first, sleep.

Numair woke up some unspecified hours later to Constant looming over him. There was a tray of hot soup – kept warm by a stasis spell set by someone with a light blue Gift – set to the side, and Numair, upon smelling it, became immediately aware of both his hunger and his filthy state.

“Do you often watch people sleep?” he asked Constant, sitting up and reaching for the tray. 

“Only when I’m worried they’re going to die,” said Constant. “You looked awful.”

Numair, focusing on wolfing down the soup as fast as he could, could only respond to that by raising his eyebrows. He doubted that was why Constant was here. There was a particularly anxious air around the boy. 

Constant eventually said what was on his mind, but he took his time about it. Numair was almost finished with both his soup and his buttered rolls before he spoke.

“Is it our fault the baby griffin died?” he asked, sitting back with his fists balled over his knees. “We let it out …”

Numair stopped eating.

“No,” he said bluntly. Constant didn’t seem convinced. “Someone shot it, Constant. We had no part in that.”

“But _we_ let it out.”

Numair shook his head again, firmer this time. “You can’t cage griffins for long,” he pointed out. “We don’t know much about them since there haven’t been griffins around in, oh, centuries. It’s only been recently that Immortal creatures have begun appearing in our mortal lands, so we’ve lost much of the knowledge we ever had on them. But we know that. They rust iron and break locks, and no magic will hold them either. I doubt even the baby ones will stay caged for long, and its parent knew it was there even if it didn’t know exactly where. It had tracked it this far. Is that what’s bothering you?”

“I’m not bothered,” lied Constant. He wasn’t a good liar. Numair wondered how long the boy’s secret eagle would last in the face of that. But the boy continued, “The Bog is on fire again. It’s been burning all night. Did we do that …?”

“Absolutely not,” said Numair, leaning forward and glaring to get force into the statement, though his voice whistled. “Look at me. That was not us. Whatever is happening out there, it’s nothing we’re involved with. Do these riots happen often? You said ‘again’.”

Constant shrugged. He seemed happier though when he said, “Pretty often. They really hate Don and the guards, so small skirmishes always turn into big ones. It doesn’t ever spread here though since we’ve got two sets of walls between us and them and they lock the Jewel down tight every time the Bog goes up. It’s just life here. I think the Immortal might have followed us home.”

Numair was, briefly, extremely alarmed as he took that to mean the griffin – then he remembered the Immortal hawk.

“Did it?” he asked curiously, looking up at the ceiling before he could catch himself.

“I think,” said Constant, frowning as he turned his attention onto his magic. Numair watched him carefully. “I can feel his … metalness? But it’s all jumbled. Like when I felt the griffin too and everything tangled together. I couldn’t tell griffin from the hawk thing. It makes me feel sick, or something does. It’s a bad hawk feeling, so maybe it’s not the Immortal at all.”

He did look peaky. He was squinting too, which suggested he had a headache.

“Multiple Immortals, perhaps,” Numair considered out loud. “Though that doesn’t make much sense. What other Immortal would be this far into the city?”

He thought of the Stormwings with a sick lurch of his stomach. They weren’t hawks. But neither was the griffin, and it seemed like Constant had felt _something_ to do with that, even if it was jumbled up by his sensing the Immortal hawk.

“I’ve felt like this before,” Constant offered, “when you were still a hawk. The same dizzy, sick feeling of something bad being overhead. I felt like it at the fair too, before Nonny led me out of there. I hope she got out too …”

“Do you know this Nonny well?” Numair asked, alarmed by this. The strange mage wasn’t someone he liked the idea of being around Constant.

Fortunately, Constant shook his head. “I’ve seen her around the Jewel, I think, but that was the first time I’d spoken to her. She said her parents know Savigny. I really do feel unwell. Do you think I’ve caught what’s making you so ill?”

“I doubt it. I think it’s your magic. It could be that the binding isn’t quite enough to _block_ your magic, but it’s making it difficult enough to use that it makes you feel unwell.” Numair studied Constant’s magic and Savigny’s Gift wrapped around it. Constant looked confused. “Ah. Of course. You didn’t even know you had wild magic, why would you know that your brother has wrapped it up in his Gift?”

“ _Sav_ has wrapped it in his Gift?” Constant looked stunned. “What? Why?”

That answered that. Savigny had not asked his brother permission to bind his magic. Numair soured towards the man in light of this information.

“I don’t know, ask him,” he said, feeling sorry for snapping as Constant recoiled. He relented towards them both: “It could be for any number of reasons. Most likely, he was scared you’d lose control of it like Daine has hers and this was his way of helping. Would you like me to remove the binding? It won’t take a moment. I won’t let your magic hurt you without it.”

Constant looked down into his lap, studying his hands. Numair waited patiently, not pushing, not fidgeting. Constant had to come to him on this.

“I think I probably could have helped the griffin baby if I’d had better magic,” said Constant in a low voice. “I’m angry I didn’t help it, that I couldn’t tell the hawks to fly away faster. I know some of them got hurt when people started shooting. I felt them. I don’t think I’m ever going to let that happen in front of me again, not now I _know_ I have magic and can make it happen different.” Numair opened his mouth to warn him that even magic didn’t stop bad things happening, but Constant wasn’t done. “I don’t want you to take Sav’s magic away yet,” he added, his expression resolute. Numair was surprised but nodded his agreement anyway. It was Constant’s choice. “I want to talk to him first. He must have had a good reason for doing it, even if he didn’t tell me. He wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt me.”

“Okay,” said Numair agreeably. “It’s your choice. But once you have, I’m here.”

“I know,” said Constant, smiling. “Thank you. Do you want to see Pippy? That’s what I’ve named my eagle. I’ve hidden her in the roof. I have a crawlspace near where I feed the birds.”

Numair declined the invitation, promising to go visit the eagle and the secret crawlspace later, once he was bathed. Constant left Numair to his thoughts as he washed, changing his sweat-stained clothes and regretting that he still hadn’t found something to tie his hair back with. He’d talk to Savigny and Daine himself, Numair decided as he opened the drapes to find a soft morning lighting up outside. He’d slept most of yesterday and all of the night. There was a smudge of smoke blurring the sky in the distance. 

The Bog, as promised, burned.


	12. And After Pride, a Fall …

Numair heard voices as he went downstairs. 

They weren’t familiar voices, at least one wasn’t, and he hesitated on the stairs and tried to get a feel for who it could be. The other was Daine. She sounded frustrated, if not borderline irate.

“Come on, Daine,” the stranger was pleading, its tone idly ingratiating. “I know he’s here somewhere. Let me see him. You do neither of you any favours by being so oblique.”

“Oh, _oblique_ , am I? That’s a word worth a copper bit at least. Did you gallop down here on your highest horse?”

Numair covered his mouth to stop from chuckling, joyous in the discovery that a riled up Daine was someone with a devastating handle on her tongue. He loved that.

“That’s not fair,” said the stranger’s voice. Male, Numair added to his mental notes on the voice’s owner. Noble-bred. “He deserves a say in his future, no matter what Savigny or you have to say on the matter. He’s not an imbécile or an infant, and I won’t have him being treated so.”

Numair raised his eyebrows, descending the stairs. The way this person said ‘Savigny’ turned the relatively simple name into something far more complex, with twice the meaning and all the derision afforded to the worst midden scum. In addition, Numair had assumed any grown noble visitor would be here seeking Savigny, but it seemed this man was here for Constant. The boy seemed so wound in his own secret fancies and his insular, private world that it was a surprise to be reminded that he was a lord in his own right, even if not seated yet.

Daine’s voice turned low and Numair was forced to move closer to the doors that led through to the kitchens where they bickered, which meant he was risking discovery. He considered giving up and just walking in on them, which would probably tell him more than continuing his brief career in eavesdropping. 

“If your business with Constant is so delightful,” she was saying, “why did you wait until Sav isn’t here to come speak to him?”

“How am I to know Savigny’s schedule? The man is like a cat, slipping out the window when you shut the parlour door. His business is his own. I don’t care a whit where he is.” The man’s voice, amusingly, cracked as he said this. “Forget Savigny. Daine, this invitation is for you too – come home! Blast this mausoleum, let Savigny moulder here like a piece of stale bread. You and Constant, come home with me. You’ll have everything you want. Constant needs raising to his status and you, you deserve everything life hasn’t given you.”

“I can’t think of anywhere I’d fit in worse,” said Daine, but the acid was gone from her voice. “We’re not children anymore.”

“More’s the pity,” said the man sadly. “It’d be easier if we were, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Daine. It was a simple yes, but it said so much.

Numair straightened his clothes and stepped back, ensuring he walked openly through the doors as though he’d been walking all along. Daine had her back to him, slouched against the grand wooden table that served as a great cooking space for absent servants. She was staring at her feet, dressed today in what looked like Constant’s clothes. Since she was as tall as him but shaped differently, they fit somewhat uncomfortably where they were tailored wrong for her build.

Numair noticed her hair before he turned his attention to the man, as for once she didn’t have it covered. It was brushed back and tied with a lovely blue ribbon, a tumble of glorious smoky-brown curls he’d never had imagined that mess could have become. He admired it briefly, then looked past her to the dire stare being levelled at him by their guest.

Numair noted, first, that the man was just as richly attired as his voice had suggested he would be, though without as much style as Savigny personified. He was mostly clothed in black, which served to wash him out terribly and make his red-rimmed and sleep-bruised eyes seem unhealthier and his pallid skin even whiter. He looked like a man who slept little and worried a lot, his dirty blonde hair dragged back into a bun with stray curls fighting loose to ping off in odd directions. The few locks of hair that had broken free to frame his thin face spiralled into natural ringlets that Numair knew from experience would be the envy of any curly-haired human who’d experienced a bad hair day. Despite this man’s general disarray, Numair doubted he was one of them. He seemed the type that bad hair wouldn’t dare happen to.

He took this in in the brief silence that followed him entering, as the man equally sized Numair up in turn, and then in the brief second that followed that silence Numair noticed something else: in the odd light of the kitchens, for a single moment he could have sworn the stranger’s blonde hair was faintly … green?

“Who is this?” snapped the man, immediately unhappy with whatever he’d seen as he’d looked at Numair. Numair had never quite had a stranger take against him so fast, and he glanced down at himself wondering what it was the man was so angry about. “I wasn’t aware Savigny had progressed to bringing his common folk home to flaunt.”

“If green was a nice shade on you, Sav would have turned your hair blue,” said Daine shortly, turning to give Numair a distracted smile. He doubted she’d have smiled at him if she hadn’t been so perplexed by this visitation, but he treasured it anyway. “This is Numair, Constant’s … teacher.”

The relief that slammed into Numair at this almost took him out at the knees. Teacher! That was another step in. By the gods, she was softening towards him. And Alanna said he couldn’t be charming!

Daine hadn’t noticed him preening.

“Numair, this is his most brattiest majesty, King Donatien,” she said, that smile turning slightly more devastating as she aimed it at the king – Numair winced – who scowled.

“I could have you arrested for that,” Donatien muttered sullenly. “Slander against the king’s person. It’s practically treasonous.”

“Don’t act like a goose and I won’t accuse you of honking,” snapped Daine, hands on hips and looking like she was about to take the king by his ear and put him on the step without supper. “His _majesty_ was just leaving. He knows the way to the door since he walked his way so rudely through it, so we won’t bother showing him out. I’m sure he’s got plenty to do elsewhere, what with half the city on fire.”

Donatien smouldered at her. There was no other description for the withering sulking he was doing in her general direction. It was about as friendly as a burning log. Despite this, he tossed his hands in the air and sighed dramatically.

“Fine!” he exclaimed, striding forward. Numair noted, as the man moved around the table and further into view, that he carried a sword. This made his quick movement to Daine rather distressing, though she seemed perfectly unalarmed by his proximity. In fact, she set her chin in a stubborn shape that Numair found rather endearing and tilted her head back to continue staring the king down despite him being an easy five inches above her in height. “Very well. I won’t peck at you like Savigny does, blast him. This is folly but you’re welcome to it if it’s what your heart desires. Come here, darling. Hug me goodbye and taunt me with how skinny you are.”

Numair blinked as Daine rolled her eyes before returning the king’s very familiar hug. It wasn’t at all a romantic embrace, though it was clear they knew exactly how to hold the other, but after the heated exchange between them he hadn’t expected _any_ kindnesses to pass between them. He suspected his confusion may stem from his relatively distant sibling relationships, as he remembered again the portrait Constant treasured. Perhaps close siblings often flew from passionate disagreement to fond embraces in the space of a sneeze. 

They broke apart, Donatien still looking rueful. He murmured something that sounded like old Gallan, a tongue Numair was unfamiliar with, and kissed the air by Daine’s cheek before stepping away. Daine watched him leave the room, her expression indecipherable. 

“What did he say?” Numair asked Daine curiously when the man was out of the room, though his footsteps still echoed back through the cavernous home. 

She looked confused for a moment, before catching up. “Bises,” she said idly, frowning at the door the king had left through. “It’s a greeting, or a farewell, I guess. Old Gallan for kisses. It fell out of practice a generation ago, even longer for commoners, but young nobles do like to bring silly frivolities back. That’s right, you’re Tortallan, aren’t you? I forget. You’re dark for a Tortallan.”

“I was born in Tyra,” he said without thinking. 

She studied him, the first real spark of interest showing between them. His heart beat quicker as he realised how time had passed around him. Her hair was cleaner, the skin on her hands and wrists that he could see scabbed over where the flea bites had marked it. Her eyes weren’t anywhere near as hollow. Though incipit, he could see the effect being out of the Bog was having on her, the woman that was emerging from the half-starved and beaten terror that had offered him her flea-bitten hand in the dark.

“Bratty or not, I envy that man’s hair,” Numair said with easy charm, offering a wry grin as he slid his fingers through his loose hair, which was falling into his eyes. “It looks like it obeys his every whim. Oh, if only life would be so kind to all us unfortunate souls who weren’t blessed at birth with the royal locks.”

Daine rocked back onto her heels, inhaling and looking shocked. Then it happened. She hissed a soft laugh that seemed to surprise her just as much as it did him, her hand snapping up to her mouth to cover it. Despite this, her eyes still smiled. 

“Given my druthers, I’d rather not have the royal attitude to go with it,” she said into that hand. Then she looked back down at her shoes, cheeks flushed under their faded tan.

So, he thought, she _is_ shy, under all that sass and fire. He hadn’t seen it when they were surrounded by those she was familiar enough with to scold mercilessly when they crossed her, but left alone with her, and without her temper up, she had all the bark of a mouse. He’d have to keep that in mind. They’d never get far with teaching her to control her frantic magic if she was flustered by him, and it wasn’t like he could just keep annoying her until she forgot to be reticent. He didn’t think he could, anyway. It hadn’t been part of the advice Alanna had given him.

She fished in the pocket of her ill-tailored trousers before inching forward and offering something to him, her cheeks still slightly pink.

“A tie,” she said, that same stubborn look back. “For your hair, if it’s bothering you. If you wet it, it’ll stay in longer with hair –” She stopped, wincing before charging forward. “– like yours. All silky.”

Numair barely managed to hide his grin.

“Thank you,” he said gallantly, holding out his hand palm up so she could drop the tie onto it. 

They both realised the problem at the same time, looking from the tie to Numair’s sling.

“Hmm,” said Numair.

Daine, with a sigh, took the tie back. “You’ll have to sit,” she grumbled at him, taking the tie to a basin of water by the sink someone had been using for something and wetting it in there. “You’re fiendishly tall.”

He did so, taking a seat and letting her tentatively pull his hair back for him. It was a very strange few minutes, stranger still because she was someone he’d had to let bathe him not so long ago. In such a short time post him regaining his mobility, he’d gained all his sensibilities back. Her fingers in his hair were a stark reminder of this.

It was over too soon. 

She stepped back, turning around and going for the door. “There you go,” she called back, “I’m going to go find –”

She stopped dead.

Numair, who had been happily touching at his pulled back hair, no longer getting in his mouth, looked up at her. He’d been planning to let her make her escape, if only with a hurried, ‘Thank you!’ called out after her. He hadn’t expected her to stop.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, curious.

She turned and looked at him. He was up in a second, striding forward and examining her suddenly grey complexion.

“Something feels wrong,” she said, touching her temple. He thought of Constant. “Don’t you feel it?”

Numair didn’t have the chance to answer. The sound of the front door violently being thrown open crashed through the house, both of them leaping around to face the danger. But it was just Donatien, who swung himself into the room with one hand on the doorframe, looking wild with his sword in his free hand.

“Daine, get your bow!” he yelled, using his momentum to wheel himself around again. “Hurry! You’re the best shot.”

“Why?” Daine hollered after him as he sprinted back to the front door. Numair followed Donatien as Daine peeled away in a different direction, presumably to do as instructed.

Donatien called back, “Stormwings!”

Numair ran faster. He burst out into the damp morning, finding a dazzling sun threatening to blind him as he followed Donatien to a group of guards wearing white surcoats with a black rose upon the front. One of them had a crossbow strung, but none seemed sure enough of their shot to be aiming it, Numair presumed, judging from the fact that it was pointed down. They craned backwards, peering up at …

The roof.

Numair’s heart dropped into his stomach, jogging backwards so he could see. Stormwings wheeled above with their beating wings casting gusts of vivid stench down to those gathering in the courtyard enclosed by the Hartholms’ great walls. The sunlight fractured off their steel feathers, making it even harder to see what was happening, especially at this angle. But Numair could guess.

There were five Stormwings overall. This was all Numair could see of them from down here. Two were being harried by something small and fast, something that glittered bronze; he suspected he knew what. They didn’t seem to like it, giving it a wider berth than the Immortal hawk’s ineffective attack on the griffin had suggested it deserved. The other three ranged over the roof, two facing the building and one dipping in and out of view as it moved between them and the object of their attention. Numair could hear raised voices. They were fighting amongst themselves.

The one on the roof gave a mighty flap of its wings and dived down between the other two and the guttering, hurtling to the ground and pulling up shortly before Numair and Donatien, who stumbled back looking ill. Numair choked back a spell just in time, remembering who Donatien was – with an astounded glance back to the guards who watched with disinterest as the deadly Immortal flew within metres of their king – and stepped between the king and the creature. The last thing Tortall needed was a dead crown next door.

“Get up there, now,” spat the Stormwing, a male with bones braided through his filthy blonde hair. “I tried to stop her attacking the boy, but she won’t listen and I won’t raise a wing to her for some motherless human brat. Hurry, he’s panicking.”

“Constant?” breathed Donatien as the Stormwing swept into the air, revealing Daine levelling her bow behind him. Not at the male Stormwing, but up at the ones above, her expression furious. Then, Donatien seemed to realise truly what he’d said. “Daine! Constant’s up there!”

Daine didn’t even nod, just narrowed her eyes and fired.

The arrow slammed true into the fleshy part of one of the Stormwing’s throats and it fell without a sound, crashing horrendously to the ground with a sound like wet meat being thrown into a pile of knives.

Numair strode forward, concentrating his Gift. It was too flashy, carrying himself up there, but it was the only way he’d make it in time. The Stormwings had to have recognised him anyway; he may as well cement their suspicions and turn their attention onto himself. He had to act fast though because he was aware –

– of Daine firing again as a female Stormwing whirled, speckling them with blood as she screamed with triumph and dived at Numair while he was busy casting –

– of that loosed arrow striking her in her hate-filled eye –

– of the talon marks down her bare chest –

– of Donatien sprinting past, shouting to Daine, “The tree! Is it still the fastest way to the crawlspace?” –

– of Daine answering, “Don, you can’t climb a _tree_!” –

– of the violent surge of wild magic that only he and Daine felt, both of them pausing in what they were doing as their heads snapped up to the source, seeing Constant buckled above –

– of what only Numair could feel, and Numair alone. Constant’s wild magic burst out of him with a violence drawn only from terrible need. He screamed. The rose-pink Gift that had bound his magic for so long had turned from innocuous and thin to savagely spiked, the nasty kickback hidden deep within it finally triggered by Constant’s uncharacteristic burst of power. Numair hadn’t seen it before now; he’d have never let it stay if he’d known. It had probably always been there. Numair had never seen anything like it in his life – and he very much doubted Savigny had put it there, despite it being hidden within his Gift. Not with what happened next.

The binding snapped. The power contained within it whiplashed back into Constant, who convulsed horribly and fell onto the sloped roof he only had a bare grip on. Something white tumbled from his slack arms, sliding down the roof with him, down the slate, catching the gutter, tumbling over the edge where it caught at a window sill and managed to stop its mad fall with frantic beating of its blood-splattered wings – but Constant dropped like a corpse, three stories down to the cobbled courtyard below.

Numair froze. Just for a moment.

The longest moment of his life.

Then he launched forward, his Gift bursting from him in an instinctual wave that caught the boy’s limp body and slowed it before it could impact the immovable ground below him. Even from here, he could tell there was something wrong; the boy was a dead weight to his Gift, and his body hung in the loose way that implied something had been done that couldn’t undone. Numair wasn’t aware of anything else except for his paramount task, bringing Constant gently to the ground and running to him. It took a second to turn Constant onto his back and for Numair to use his Gift to probe for signs of life.

Everything else around him was unimportant. He blocked it all out.

Someone hit the cobblestones beside them, leaning over Constant too as they breathed raggedly. 

“No heartbeat,” Numair hissed, horrified. He glanced at Constant’s eyes, which were open and vaguely surprised. “No! Damn, no!”

“You’re a mage,” spat the person next to him. Numair blinked. Some awareness snapped back through the shock. He’d assumed it was Daine; it was not. Donatien was staring at him, white through the sheen of fear-sweat he was exuding, his pupils wide. He was truly and outrageously frightened. Numair didn’t know if it was for Constant, or of Numair. “Do something!”

“He needs a healer.” Numair sat up, looking around as his brain failed to come up with a solution that wasn’t spectacularly stupid. “Can anyone heal!? Someone!”

Daine was firing calmly at the Stormwings, though Numair could see that she was ashen with dread. It didn’t shake any of her shots and, it seemed, between her and the Immortal hawk, they were being driven away. The guards watched with insolent apathy.

“I don’t keep mages among my personal guards,” stammered Donatien.

Numair looked at him. The boy king, he remembered Elspeth had called Donatien. Numair truly saw it now, and he was infuriated. How _dare_ this man be so outrageously useless! A Tortallan page could have done better, or a Rider trainee, younger than this man and more useful by far.

Under Numair’s hand, there wasn’t a heartbeat or, if there was, it was slower than he could detect without burning the boy out, and slowing further with every precious minute that passed. 

“Go for help!” Donatien screamed at the guards, pointing to the gate. “Go!”

One guard began to walk towards the gate, unhurriedly. Donatien closed his eyes as though the sight pained him. Teeth gritted. Numair felt a cold hand of pure rage close around his heart; he almost roared at the guard, at Donatien, at the Stormwings, at Constant’s cor …

He looked down at the boy. It wasn’t fair. 

It wasn’t _fair._

The Stormwings were gone. Daine lowered her bow and, finally, looked at Constant. Her eyes were glassy with shock and she was beginning to tremble.

They had so little, these two. Just each other.

No, thought Numair.

“I’ll go myself,” breathed Donatien, vanishing in a heartbeat as he hurtled past the guard and for the gate. “Hold him here! Please!”

“You should move him,” Daine managed, her voice choked tight. “Don’t leave him there, for Sav to see … don’t let Sav walk in and see that. Please. Let me talk to him, tell him first. He’s done enough walking in on dead family without warning.”

No, thought Numair.

He closed his eyes, wrapping that cold fist instead around his Gift. As though it knew his intent and hated it, it fought his iron control. But he was Numair Salmalín. He was a black robe mage. His will was his power; his power was a tool; he would _not_ see the woman who’d taken his hand in the dark lose the boy she loved as a brother. 

He took his Gift and he slammed it down into the ground, pouring everything he’d regained since waking up human into the rock and slate of the deep mountain roots below. There were hollows down there, and he burned them out. Melted rock and burned wood and felt the ground quiver with shock. He gave it everything; he gave it more than everything just to be sure. All he left behind were the last dying sparks he didn’t need to stay alive. These he balled up in his hand with two left to spare. They were so small. He hoped he hadn’t misjudged.

And he closed his hand over the boy’s quiet heart and let one of those sparks slam with dizzying speed from Numair’s core to the boy. He didn’t hear the burst of his Gift shocking Constant in an attempt to undo the damage the trapped bindings had done; he didn’t hear anything so focused he was on ensuring he’d pushed every drop of his overpowered Gift away except for what he needed for his task. If he used too much, he’d kill Constant just as surely as the ground would have. Too little and he’d have spent himself for nothing. 

The first shock didn’t work. The failed heart remained silent.

Numair did it again. This time hurt. He’d been in shock for the first one, he presumed, because only now was he aware of a dull buzzing in his ears and his entire body trying to rebel against the near-suicidal channelling of his Gift into the ground below. He felt hot and sick, the ground unsteady below him. Something was roaring. Constant twitched this time, his heart flickering. His life sparking and trying to grab onto existence. But it wasn’t quite enough.

Damn, thought Numair, gritting his teeth, steeling his body, and trying one final time.

This time, after it was done, he opened his eyes. Everything was hazy. His entire existence was pain. He blinked and realised he was staring up at the sky. Flat on his back, on the ground. He tipped his head up and tried to look around, finding Daine holding Constant as he threw up. Alive. He was _alive_.

Numair croaked. There was no moisture left in his body. Everything was terrible. He’d sunk into the ground, he realised, the cobblestone turning molten around him. Annoying. Something was on fire and there were bits of burning wood everywhere. Also annoying. People were screaming. Both Daine and Constant were looking at him, Constant sickly and confused and Daine crying.

“That,” wheezed Numair to the white-spotted darkness where he knew they were sitting as his vision swam in and out, “is why you both need to _learn_.”

And then, blessedly, he passed out.


	13. The Best Laid Plans of Mages, and Then …

Constant’s brain felt melted, everything around him happening through a sluggish fog of confusion. Daine had her arm looped around his chest and she was half-dragging him upright as she screamed at the palace guards who were descending upon them with weapons drawn. Something was on fire. Constant buckled as his gut lurched, managing to avoid vomiting on Daine’s boots. He couldn’t hear what she was screaming through his ears ringing.

Her arm slipped away and he slid to his knees, his bones gone wobbly. He thought he might have landed in the vomit. He was scared. What was happening?

His vision sharpened and he looked up, still dizzy but working his way through it. Daine stood over him, bow drawn with an arrow nocked to it. Her quiver hung from her shoulder and she was in the stance that meant she was ready to fire again as soon as this one was loosed.

“You get away from that man,” she snarled, her voice breaking through the ringing. “You’ve got no right to put your hands on him.”

Constant turned with care, squinting through an astounding headache. The first thing he noticed was that the stable was on fire. Ash and burning fragments of wood kept floating down. Then he saw the courtyard, which was buckled as though a great wave had rolled over it. The cobbles were melted together into a queer grey slate, warped into fantastic shapes by some invisible hand that had pushed them up from below. Numair was sprawled in the centre of the mess, his eyes closed. Some of his hair had escaped the tie he’d pulled it back in, giving him a lopsided look. He wasn’t moving.

It was Numair the palace guards were threatening with their swords, Constant realised with a shudder. They looked frightened and angry.

He remembered, with another shudder, the metal bird-humans. But when he looked up there was nothing above but more dizziness as vertigo tipped him onto his side with a fresh burst of pain in his aching chest. Clutching at his heart – it _hurt_ , it had never hurt like this! – Constant moaned Daine’s name. He wanted the guards gone. He wanted, he realised, his _brother_.

“It’s okay, Constant,” said Daine without looking at him, a smile turning her anger into a true threat, “they’re leaving. Now.”

“Great mage-works are a crime against the crown,” said the largest guard. He had a horrible face. Constant, who got along with almost every single guard in the Jewel, hated him. “Something like that, that’s capital. He melted the ground!”

“He can’t be allowed,” said another.

“Did you see me shoot that creature?” Daine said, Constant looking with the guards as they glanced at one of the metal bird-things, dead on the ground. Constant threw up again when he saw it, though all he had left by now was water and bile. “Look at it and then look at me. You are _much_ closer to me than it was.”

There was silence. The guard seemed to be judging the distance between Daine’s bow and his throat and finding that it was too small for comfort.

He stepped back, uneasy.

There was a great commotion by the gate. Constant, who thought he might be about to be sicker than ever, managed to squint over there and found Don striding in with Adel by his side. The Darragon guards, who knew Constant well, were there too. Elspeth was three steps behind until she saw Constant on the ground and began to run. Before Constant knew it, she had her arms around him and was pulling him close – Don inches behind.

“Goddess bless, you’re alive,” whispered Don, crouching beside them both and resting his hand on Constant’s elbow. 

“Don’t,” Constant rasped. Every word stumbled from a mouth that felt disconnected from his brain. “Don’t _let_ them.”

Elspeth crushed Constant closer to her chest, but he was desperate that Don, who was looking from Constant to Numair, would understand.

“Please,” he managed. Don was frozen. Constant couldn’t get out the _don’t let them arrest Numair_ no matter how much he forced it.

“I don’t understand,” said Don, his hand hot on Constant’s icy skin. “Lady Elspeth, is he –”

Constant couldn’t focus anymore; it was too loud.

He closed his eyes.

He snapped awake in the parlour where Daine slept at night, laid gentle on the mat she used as a bed. It was one of the bigger rooms in the front of the house, which was lucky as there were an awful lot of people in here. Adel was standing over Constant, looking grim. Elspeth was there with Daine by where they’d put Numair, on the rug before the fire with a cushion tucked under his head as a pillow. Two guards at each door and set of windows made for eight guards, all in the blue cinquefoil surcoats of Darragon fief. Their father’s old valet, Ruben, was there too, lingering by the fireplace with his expression carefully blank. In a house where most of the time only two people lived, this was a tremendous amount of space being used.

Constant sat up onto his knees and felt Adel step aside.

“Easy, lad,” said Adel in his solemn voice. “You’ve had a rough shock.”

“Is Numair okay?” demanded Constant, forcing himself onto his feet. He didn’t care how dizzy he was. “Where’s Don? Did Daine shoot someone? Is Ellie going to heal Numair?”

“I’m not a healer, Constant,” said Elspeth brusquely. “And anyone who is isn’t going to be silly enough to come here, not after that open show of criminality out there.”

Adel snorted but, when Constant looked up at him, he wasn’t smiling at all. 

“Daine?” Constant turned on her after a glance at Numair showed he still wasn’t awake.

“Lady Elspeth says he doesn’t need healing for the sleep,” said Daine. Constant relaxed. Daine wouldn’t lie to him. “It’s just because he was foolish and overexerted.”

“And some!” Elspeth huffed. “Not a flicker left! Any more and he’d be dead. No surprise considering the mess out there. Utterly outrageous, I cannot fathom what the fool was think –”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Adel idly. “Seems to me he was thinking quite fast. A man with enough power to flux the earth is a man with too much power to live to his age unless he knows exactly how to use it. My guess is he did exactly as he needed and no less.”

Elspeth huffed again.

“Perhaps,” she conceded, “but, even so. He’ll likely sleep for days now and must be left to do so. What about the other one? What’s to be done about him? He saw it all.”

“I’ll talk to him,” said Daine.

“What about Numair’s lungs?” Constant asked. They looked at him. “Didn’t you say he had to breathe deep to stop his lungs collapsing, Daine? How can he do that if he’s asleep?”

Daine didn’t answer, but she looked troubled.

Constant added, somewhat petulantly, “And where is _Don_?”

“Our Lord Majesty is not going to want a mage of this power in his kingdom,” said Adel.

Constant went cold with fear. They had to be talking about Numair, about Don sending Numair away for some great act of magic he’d done while Constant had been – injured? Confused? Whatever had happened to him past the creatures finding him on the roof and …

One of them, the horrible lady one, she’d attacked him when he hadn’t answered her. And Pippy had fought back and there had been blood and then, and then, Constant couldn’t _remember._

Panic began to pull tight around him. He hated the panic. It had come after his parents had died, so overwhelming that everything stopped in his brain except a crushing, spiralling terror that left him unable to cry out for help until it passed. It had come less as time had gone on, but sometimes, if he thought too much about Daine leaving and Don leaving and the potential for Sav to leave too if Constant got sent to Hartholm fief, alone, it came back worse than ever. And now, Pippy and Numair, and –

He stood on wobbly legs.

“Privy,” he muttered when Adel looked at him. One of the guards went to follow. “No! Just … no.”

He looked at Daine with his most hopeful expression.

“We’d smell them if they came back,” she said – Constant shuddered, remembering the stink of the metal birds as that one had lashed at Pippy, and the terrible clashing in his brain – “Let him go if he’s feeling okay.”

They let him go. 

Constant, as soon as he was out of sight, ran. There was no climbing the tree to get up to Pippy’s hide-hole, he knew, not with the panic looming. He’d have to get into the crawlspace via the internal passages, and the closest entrance to one of those was in Sav’s study.

As he went, he thought about Numair leaving. The weeks with Numair, they’d been so different from what Constant was used to. The potential for magic and for Daine to get better. If she were better, Sav would be happier. If Sav were happier, he wouldn’t leave Constant alone so much. And Constant himself, he’d learn his own magic. It was so tantalisingly close, but he’d lose even the hope of some of it happening if Numair left. He’d lose Numair too, and Constant didn’t want Numair to go. No one liked Constant like Numair seemed to.

The panic was here. Constant hurtled into Sav’s study, flung himself at the wall where he knew the secret panel was, and battled with the suffocating feeling of terror before it swallowed him –

“What are you doing?”

Constant lurched around to find Don hunkered behind Sav’s desk, curled in the chair with a knee to his chest and his hands fiddling.

Constant stared at him.

“Is there a passage in here?” Don asked. He put both feet on the floor as he sat up to peer down at the panel Constant had scrabbled half-open. “I thought Sav and Daine had found them all already. We used to terrorise the staff with them when we were your age.”

He leaned back in the chair, looking wistful. He was holding Sav’s knife, Constant realised, the one Sav had stabbed the writ of exile into the wall with. Constant stood. The writ was on the desk in front of Don where he must have been reading it.

“You’re still here?” Constant asked. He was shaking but the panic had been knocked back by the shock of finding Don. Now he just felt sore.

“Yes, evidently,” said Don. “I wanted to make sure you were well, but they didn’t want me down there and I didn’t want to … see. Are you? Well, I mean.”

Constant ignored that in favour of what was much more important: “Are you going to send Numair away?” he demanded, stepping forward. He’d never spoken to Don like this, not ever, but _someone_ had to. To his credit, Don looked shocked at Constant’s tone. “You can’t. He _has_ to stay. He’s here to help Daine!”

And me, he thought, but knew better than to tell Don about his newly found magic.

“That man is dangerous,” Don said with a frown. “You cannot possibly understand the damage an out-of-control mage can do. Consider that your parents were killed by mages –”

“My parents _were_ mages,” Constant said stubbornly. “My brother is a mage. Are you saying Savigny is dangerous?”

“Magic hurts people,” Don said in a voice Constant had never heard from him before, a voice that didn’t even sound like his it was so low and hateful. “It doesn’t matter if most mages are benign. Most _fire_ is benign, but if there’s a blaze in the city we put it out before it spreads. The fire doesn’t mean to hurt people. It’s just in its nature. I don’t hate fire, Constant, but I must protect my people from it because I know its nature is to burn. How can you see what magic does to Daine, to our families, and still think it’s something that mere humans can control the nature of?”

They stared at each other, Don’s expression unfamiliar and Constant distraught by this stranger wearing the face of someone he’d always thought was a friend. For the first time, Constant realised that maybe Sav and Don weren’t, as he’d privately suspected, going to reconnect as though they’d never fought. Don was never coming back to them. Don would leave.

Everything was cold again.

There was a bang at the window. Constant jerked back against the wall as Don wheeled, Sav’s knife held ready. But it wasn’t a metal bird thing flapping at the glass.

It was Pippy.

Don strode over without Constant saying anything, pulling open the window with a soft sound of awe as the eagle leapt from the sill to the floor and shambled to Constant. Constant stared at her as she studied him first from one eye and then the other before climbing into his lap and craning up to groom his hair.

“Huh,” said Don, but Constant wasn’t listening.

“Hello,” he whispered, touching the eagle with one amazed finger. He could feel _so much_. Normally, he could tell a raptor’s mood and if it was sick. He could tell if they liked or disliked something, and their general amicability. They took well to him, mostly, and he always knew if there was one around. But there had always, for as long as he could remember, been a veil between him and the birds, something that he’d bump against if he tried to actively reach for them.

That was gone. 

He knew the shape of her body, the most abstract idea of how it all functioned. He knew exactly how old she was and that she liked him because he felt, to her, like one of her chicks. She didn’t speak to him in words like a person, but he knew her despite that. Something jumped from him to her and he knew that one her talons hurt when it was cold ever since it had been bitten by a spotted cat, and that she was scared of dogs, and that her favourite food to hunt was the large fish that leapt from the coldest waters and flew like they had wings. It was overwhelming. It was _exciting_. He could lose himself in it. He wondered, briefly, if he could put more of himself in her and go with her when she flew …

“Constant,” said Don.

Constant snapped back to himself. Pippy was scolding him with harsh eagle thoughts for falling so clumsily from the nest. He touched her chest, astounded by the firm, undamaged flesh there. He could have sworn he’d seen the metal bird people slash her into bits with their terrible wings when she’d tried to protect her chi – him. Had he hallucinated it?

He couldn’t have. There was blood on his clothes from where he’d held her as she’d bled out.

Don had come over to them. He wasn’t at all afraid of Pippy when she hissed at him, Don using her bird-balance against her as he slid a cushion between Constant’s lap and the eagle’s talons. Too late for his pants, Constant noticed that she was shredding them.

“Their talons aren’t really well-designed for walking flat,” Don explained. “She doesn’t mean to cut you. Her weight on your arm will slice too unless you wear a gauntlet or brace.”

Constant stared at him. It was uncanny. Suddenly, he was _Don_ again, the Don who’d been the first person to put a hawk on Constant’s arm and who’d promised him the pick of the palace mews when it came to establishing his own. Don, who loved animals and had taught Constant to love them even before Daine had come to them.

“Beautiful,” said Don with a delighted smile, examining every part of Pippy he could without risking her angry beak. “She’s a stunner. Broadwing class, which is perfect for you. They’re excellent for soaring while you ride, and mountain terrains. You need a bird that doesn’t need monitoring to stop it wasting energy while you explore all the wildest places Hartholm Fief has to offer.”

“But she’s a sea eagle,” Constant said through his confusion. Was he supposed to be mad at Don still? Oh, he didn’t know. Adults were so complicated; he’d never understand them.

“Sea eagles sometimes migrate inland by choice,” said Don. “You don’t even have to train her to take a hood, not like a longwing. What a spectacular bird. I didn’t realise Savigny had relaxed his moratorium on animals.”

“Oh, he …”

Constant looked at Pippy, swallowing hard.

“Ah,” said Don. “I assumed you’d had her trained to your hand for some time now. She’s very comfortable with you. How did you manage that while keeping her a secret?” He was frowning now, examining Pippy with a more critical eye. “That’s not fair on her if she’s not being flown properly. She’s not a bird you can make mistakes with, Connie. I taught you better than that.”

Constant sensed it was time to change the subject. It worked with Numair too, when his questions got too pointed; Constant simply distracted using something he knew they’d rather talk about than whatever they were poking at.

“What were those things?” he asked, thinking of the metal bird creatures. Don looked blank for a moment, so he added, “The metal birds with the human parts.”

Don’s expression twisted into unease. “Stormwings,” he said. There was a brief pause as he inhaled; Constant didn’t understand the expression on his face. “They’re an Immortal monster, leaked back into this …” But he stopped, that unfathomable expression turning even stranger. “I mean, they’re a creature. Just a creature. I don’t know their purpose, but they defile the remains of those slain in battle. It’s an ill omen for a monarch whose reign is accompanied by the return of them.”

Constant was intrigued. He’d never known Don to hate any animal before, though it seemed an Immortal with human speech through human mouths implied there was a human brain and soul behind it too. Don was certainly capable of being hateful to humans, he supposed, though that was a conclusion that settled uneasily onto him.

“Are they evil?” asked Constant.

This earned him a wry stare. “Nothing is truly evil,” said Don.

Constant barely managed to still his tongue from asking, Except mages, except magic?

“But they’re a sign the balance is shifting out of favour for humanity,” Don continued. “They’ve magic of their own, the same as any Immortal. Something is summoning them back into our realm, where they’re not wanted or welcome. Did you hear there was a griffin attack at the fair as well? And Spidrens attacking the trade routes. Next we’ll have dragons and other infernal beasts too, all needing slaying and not enough knights to be doing it.”

He was sweating. He didn’t look well.

Constant took a risk.

“Slaying creatures is just hunting wearing an honourable hat to hide that you don’t eat the dead after,” he said, barely able to maintain eye contact with Don as he tested these uncertain waters. “You don’t even like hunting, unless it’s to feed something. You’ve _never_ liked hunting for fur or sport or honour. I don’t believe you’d send knights to kill a griffin anymore than you’d kill a wolf.”

Don stared at him. “Wolves belong in this world,” he said finally, his tone clipped.

Constant said, thinking of himself and Daine and Numair and everyone he loved, “Magic is human too, so it belongs too. Just like the wolves, and the hawks, and maybe the griffins too.” He looked down at his hands, fingers pulled tight against his palm and nails cutting in. He whispered, softly, “The baby griffin didn’t deserve to die.”

Don didn’t answer.

There were voices coming towards them, raised voices. Their conversation ended here, especially as Constant recognised one of them.

Don shot upright. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, going to put them behind his back and then into his pockets as he changed his mind. Finally, he settled for patting down his clothes and then crossing them in front of his chest.

Savigny walked in. He saw, first, Don. Then he looked at Constant and saw Pippy, his eyebrows raising. Then he looked at Don again. There was a grim silence. Finally, he strode into the room proper, ignoring Don as he kneeled beside Constant, keeping his distance from Pippy’s ruffled stare.

“I was told …” he began, his voice the closest to shaken Constant had heard it in a while. He seemed confused. “Are you okay?”

Constant shrugged. He felt terrible and he was still miserable about Numair, but he hadn’t been hurt: Pippy had. All he’d done was apparently fall from the roof, which either hadn’t happened because he wasn’t dead or _had_ happened and Numair had caught him which had caused the big magic everyone was furious about. Either way, he was fine now. 

“Don’s going to send Numair away,” Constant said, Don wincing. 

“No, he’s not,” said Sav calmly. “Don’t think for a second we aren’t going to talk about this just because you’re distracting me with Don’s tantrums.”

‘This’ seemed to be Pippy, but Sav didn’t appreciate Constant telling him that.

“Don’t name it,” Sav warned. 

“Excuse me,” said Don, voice back to hateful, “but I think I _am_ going to send your pet mage away. Have you not seen what he’s done to your grounds? He –”

“Saved my brother’s life, I’m told,” Sav snarled, turning on Don with all the speed of a fighting hound. Constant looked to the door, wondering if they’d notice him leaving. He’d seen enough of their arguments to know he didn’t need to see another. “Something that _your_ guards did precious little of. Did you not ask him to heal? Was that not a _royal_ request from your majesty’s glorious royal mouth? Or was it just more royal air from your majesty’s royal a – Constant, out. Go to Daine.”

Constant didn’t argue. Sav not wanting him there meant they were about to get mean with each other. He took Pippy with him, stopping at the door and turning to say one last thing to Don.

“Sav’s already exiled,” he reminded Don anxiously, “so you can’t exile him again.”

Don glowered, but Constant had already fled.

Behind him, the study door slammed shut with enough magical force to send the basket of rocks holding it open flying. Constant didn’t stay to hear what came after.

The Darragon guards helped get Numair up to his room before leaving, Elspeth reassuring them that Numair would be fine once he’d slept, however long that took. Constant knew they were carefully avoiding the topic of Numair’s lungs though because Daine got a fierce furrow on her forehead whenever Constant brought them up. The house felt extra empty once everyone was gone, especially Don. He’d flown down from the study in a temper, barely stopping to say goodbye before leaving. Constant worried he’d gone home without guards after dismissing the ones he’d come with – Constant had been relieved to hear Daine hadn’t had to shoot any of them – but Daine reassured him Elspeth and Adel had left a small group outside to escort him. 

Sav hadn’t come out of his study. Constant worried about him too. He put Pippy in his room with water and half a cooked rabbit before going to check on Numair, who slept. Daine dozed beside him. There didn’t seem to be much Constant could do there, so he went outside and looked at the damage done. The courtyard was ruined, the stable fire out – he didn’t even know who’d put it out, or if it had magically gone out when Numair had collapsed – but the stables were a skeletal ghost of what they had been. Ruben was out there examining them.

“Guess it’s lucky Sav sold all the horses,” said Constant sadly, reaching out to touch one of the twisted black posts that had held it up so recently and now no longer. 

“Aye,” said Ruben, shaking his head. “Never seen the like. They didn’t even burn like a real fire, more cooked up the wood from the inside out.”

Constant looked again at the post, backing up from it as he remembered what Don had said about magic burning even when it didn’t mean to.

“Think your friend might have done some damage underground too,” said Ruben thoughtfully, walking towards the house as he pointed to the east wing, which hadn’t been used since their parents had died. “See the roof? See how it bows? That’s structural. There’s cracks at the foundation, down there, meaning the bricks are sheering.”

“Whoa,” said Constant, alarmed. “Is the house going to fall down?”

“Maybe that wing,” Ruben pondered. “Your brother will want to do something about it, but it won’t take the rest down if he’s smart about it. Don’t go in there for now, you hear? Not till your brother’s in a mood to be told.”

Constant nodded. “He fought with Don again,” he offered cautiously, wondering what Ruben would say. He’d known Don since before Constant was born. Maybe he had advice.

But the man just said, “Aye-yup,” and kept chewing on the cigar he hadn’t lit.

Shrugging, Constant left. He went and looked at the spot where he’d fallen from the roof, staring up at it and considering climbing up to see if there was more evidence of Pippy’s blood despite her intact body. But that was too complicated right now. He went inside instead, to eat leftovers from yesterday’s meal and then to bounce around aimlessly until his bouncing brought him to Sav’s still-closed study door. Constant collected the rocks back into the basket, which helped keep him calm until they were all together again. Then he knocked.

There was no answer but Constant hadn’t expected one. He went in anyway, finding Sav hunkered moodily at the desk and glaring out the window like the smoky city had caused all his troubles. Because he didn’t immediately know what to say, Constant busied himself with propping the door back open.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Sav said of the basket of rocks. “It’s cracked.”

“It’s not cracked,” said Constant softly. “It’s safer to have doors open.”

He was hurt, but he didn’t show it. Sav was always spinier after Don ruffled him.

“Cracked,” muttered Sav.

So that was how it was going to be, Constant thought wearily.

“Are you going to let Don send Numair away?” he demanded.

“No.”

Constant relaxed. That had been his biggest worry, but he knew that Sav always _always_ had the final word when it came to Don. Numair was safe.

“Don says magic is like fire,” Constant tried next. Sav grunted but didn’t answer. “He says it burns even if it doesn’t mean to. He says I should look at how magic hurts Daine before I trust it.”

“Don’s a coward masquerading as a king,” Sav replied.

Constant guessed that was probably true, but even cowards could be afraid of sensible things sometimes. “He also said … our parents, they died by magic. Everyone says mages killed them, and Eloise’s family. And the queen. Is he wrong? If magic were banned and people listened, those mages wouldn’t have killed them. And you don’t like using your Gift.”

“They would have used knives or swords or poison,” was Sav’s slow answer, finally looking at Constant for the first time this entire conversation. “Don’t try to out-logic Don out of a position he’s let fear chase him into. He’s not correct. He’s afraid. There’s a very big difference. I’m afraid of wildfire, but I’ll still cook my meals.”

“You can’t cook,” said Constant. 

Sav threw a piece of chalk at him, Constant dodging it with his first laugh all day. A great weight felt like it fell away from him with that laugh. Sav was right. Sav was often right, though not always. Magic just needed to be understood, like fire. There was no point shivering to death because the potential for being burned was frightening.

Feeling better now, he said, “Does this mean Numair is going to teach me magic? He seems very sure that we need to learn control, me and Daine both.”

“You do, yes, and yes, he is.” Sav hesitated, standing up and coming out from behind his desk to walk over to Constant. Constant waited, curious. “I was told it was losing control of your magic that hurt you today. Well, I wasn’t told … I wasn’t told you were hurt, Constant. I was told worse than that.”

He seemed really upset, Constant thought. Too upset considering that Constant was fine.

“I fell off the roof,” explained Constant. “I think the Stormwings –”

“Stormwings too?” asked Sav with a frown, obviously distracted. “A griffin yesterday, Stormwings today … this seems ill timed, what with our dear king’s magical paranoia. What did the Stormwings do?”

“They attacked me, but Pippy drove them away,” said Constant. “I thought she was hurt but I must have been wrong. And then I fell, but Numair did some _huge_ magic and caught me. But I wasn’t hurt, just confused. Who told you? Maybe my magic did do something. I don’t remember.”

Sav just kept looking at him in that strange, intent way.

“Ruben thinks maybe Numair’s magic is going to make Maman and Papa’s wing fall down,” Constant offered as well, assuming it would make his brother stop staring. 

It didn’t seem to be working. Sav just shrugged.

Constant went for what he was certain would.

“Can I keep my eagle?” he asked.

Sav laughed, but the sound was hoarse. Shocking Constant, he didn’t say no, and he didn’t get mad, and he didn’t do anything that was at _all_ like he was usually. Instead, he pulled Constant into the strangest hug Constant had ever been in, suddenly finding himself bailed up against his brother’s chest with his nose crushed into the itchy embroidery on the front of his vest. Sav smelled of lady perfume and burning wood, and he was a lot firmer than Constant remembered him being the last time they’d hugged which had been, gosh. Easily years ago. The funeral of the queen, Constant thought. He was briefly annoyed by the lingering hug, then delighted as he realised he was taller than he’d been back then. 

“I love you, little brother,” said Sav.

Constant froze. Those words terrified him. They never said that, not ever. _Don_ told people he loved them; he’d used to say it all the time. Constant would pass the water jug and Don would say, “Brilliant, I love you,” instead of ‘Thanks’. He’d say it instead of hello and in the place of ‘see you soon’. Daine said it when she was feeling soft, and it was always warm from her. Sav? Sav only said it sometimes. He’d said it at their parents’ funeral, to the pyres. He’d screamed it to Daine when she was lost with the horses. And he’d said it _once_ to Don that Constant knew of; he’d said it the day he’d told Don he was stepping down as the Gift because he didn’t want to be a part of what Don was building.

When Sav said ‘I love you’, Constant thought that he might actually mean ‘Goodbye’.

Sav let go.

“Just so you know,” said Sav with a shrug that was _too_ careless, striding past and leaving the room. Constant stayed there, trembling. Why had Sav said that? Was he leaving?

Where was he going?

“Come on,” Sav called back, “let’s go see Numair.”

They weren’t to wake Numair up, they were told, so there was very little that could be done over the following days except wait for his body and Gift to sort themselves out. It wasn’t a good time for Constant. He spent the entire span of it anxious about people leaving in various ways, compulsively checking in on Numair – who slept – and pestering Sav, who was strangely present for the whole time, about Pippy.

Daine cracked first.

“Let him keep the bird,” she said over breakfast, which was today bad porridge since Sav had cooked. No one was hungry anyway. They stared at her, shocked. “Honestly, it’s not like keeping me away from animals helped anyway, I still get lost. And he loves Pippy. You can’t take her away now. What would you even _do_ with an eagle to get rid of it?”

She called Pippy by her name.

Constant loved her so much at that moment. 

“Besides,” she added, poking her porridge in a suspicious manner, like she expected it to poke back, “if Numair does what he promised and sorts this cursed magic out, I won’t need to avoid animals anymore.”

She looked, briefly, wistful.

“Fine,” said Sav. In the wake of this statement – Constant could keep Pippy! – he stood and dropped his spoon into his porridge. It bounced out. “I’m going to go check on him. How long did Elspeth say he was going to sleep for?”

“Days,” replied Daine. “I don’t like it … if she’s wrong and he stays asleep longer, we’re in real trouble. He’ll dehydrate. He’s already dry.”

“The mages I’ve known who over-reached woke up sporadically when they needed it,” Sav said with a frown. “They slept for ages, true, but they didn’t sleep for days straight.”

“Yeah, but he melted the _cobblestones_ he had so much Gift to push away. And that was an accident, I think.” Daine pushed her porridge away as well. “I don’t know how to get more water into him while he’s unconscious. Ma did herbs, not proper medicine.”

“I’ll check on him,” Sav said again, firmer this time. “Maybe he’ll wake up and all this worrying will be for nothing. Daine, why don’t you take some coin and buy some actual breakfast for us. Take Constant. The riots are down so the Jewel is waking up. The bakers will be open, anyway.”

Daine agreed. The trip was quiet. Constant chattered the whole time, just to keep their spirits up, and neither of them talked about how, despite the bustle of the city which had been quiet for days, a wood-smoke haze still hung over everything. No one wanted to talk about how much of the Bog had burned.

When they got back, they found that Sav had been optimistic. Numair had woken up, but it hadn’t solved all their worries.

He was worse.

“Pox,” muttered Daine, leaning over Numair as she listened to his lungs. Constant lingered nearby, watching how glassy Numair’s dark eyes looked in the light of the shuttered oil lamp. 

“Pneumonia?” rasped Numair.

Constant could hear from here how his breath didn’t wheeze anymore, but popped. It was a wet, uncomfortable sound, and it caught at the end of every exhale. Numair seemed exhausted, his hair slick to his sweat-soaked head and his skin sallow under its natural colour. Sav leaned by the door, his nose wrinkled. Constant didn’t blame him. It smelled sick in here.

“Sav, your friends – are any of them healers?” asked Daine without answering Numair. None of them needed to. He knew.

Sav shook his head.

Constant kept his eyes on Numair, who looked frustrated. His eyes kept slipping shut before he’d shake himself awake again. Constant suspected he was still supposed to be asleep, but the fever had woken him before his body was ready. The damage was done anyway. Congestion had set in, which meant he couldn’t take the deep breaths his body needed, which meant his lungs were slowly collapsing in on themselves. 

“How?” snapped Daine. “How can there be _none_?”

“Healers heal,” Numair forced out, moistly. Every word seemed like it hurt him. “When there are skirmishes, they’re involved. I presume in skirmishes where mages are the targets, this makes them exceptionally vulnerable.”

Sav nodded.

“Very well,” said Numair. “We’re not fooling anyone pretending this is good news. If I’m to get worse before I, preferably, get better, we need to talk first. And I don’t have a lot of air so don’t interrupt me. Savigny, the bindings you put on Daine and Constant. Why?”

Daine didn’t look surprised, Constant sneaking a glance at her under his lashes. He guessed she must have known. Sav, however, looked astounded that Numair not only knew about them, but that he was so blunt.

“Don’t lie to me,” warned Numair.

“They helped Daine before,” said Sav. “My parents used them under instruction when they were alive and she never lost herself during that. When she became … when it got worse, after they died, we were desperate. They didn’t work as well. I am not as strong in my Gift as they were, though I don’t understand why this is important.”

“You didn’t ask Constant permission,” said Numair coldly. “I won’t stand for that. In Tortall, we arrest mages for that. I don’t know how it is in Galla, but no mage associated with me will influence another mage’s Gift – or wild magic – without explicit permission, or else I _will_ take steps against them. Understand?”

Sav, shocked into silence, just nodded.

“Did you intend for the bindings to be fatal if breached?” asked Numair.

No one spoke. Daine almost dropped the water jug she was using to wet a towel. She managed to catch it though and set it, shaking, onto the side table before covering her mouth with her hands.

Sav said, his voice like ice, “Excuse me?”

“I didn’t think so.” Numair went quiet, his air whistling in and out in between ragged, congested coughs. “Ah, awful. Being ill is awful. I hate this country. Your bindings have nasty tricks built into them, Savigny. I haven’t been able to examine them closer yet but, in case I’m unable to do so, you must not attempt to remove Daine’s yourself. In fact, I would stress this – I prefer you don’t use your Gift at all for now, unless explicitly instructed to by a trusted source. If you try to remove Daine’s without knowing what you’ve done, you could kill her.”

Sav had gone ashen. Daine started towards him when she saw his face, but he backed away from her. Constant watched, fascinated in a terrible way by how horrified his brother was.

“If I’m unable to,” Numair continued, his dark eyes locked on Sav’s, “take Daine to Tortall. I don’t know any of your mages. Take her to Sinthya fief. Ask for Sir Raoul of Goldenlake, a knight currently stationed there in command. Daine, your belt knife – give it here.”

Daine handed it over without question, shocked into silence by Numair’s astonishing instructions, and by what he did next. Constant knew enough about Numair to know he was vain. Growing up with Sav, Constant knew vanity. Sav knew how to handle a face paint brush better than Daine did, and he had twice as many jewels. So when Numair took a lock of his hair and cut it without even hesitating, Constant’s heart – already thumping unhappily from everything that had been said – thumped even harder. It seemed more dire than he’d even imagined. 

“Take this, show it to Raoul, and tell him my name,” instructed Numair, giving the knife and hair to Daine. “There are spells that they can use to ensure it was given voluntarily, and that I was alive when it was taken. Have Raoul take you, all three of you, to Sir Alanna of Pirate’s Swoop and Olau, the King’s Champion. She’s wildly Gifted and understands curses and curse breaking. Besides myself, she’s the only person I’d entrust to undo them without risking the same backlash that killed Constant.” 

Constant blinked. Killed?

He looked at Sav, who’d slid sideways across the wall until he’d come to a chair, which he’d sunk down into. Numair was looking at him too.

“I won’t be there to bring her back like I did Constant if you disobey me,” warned Numair.

Sav covered his mouth in a gesture so much like Daine that Constant, had the situation not been so terrible, almost laughed. 

“I killed my brother?” whispered Sav.

“Yes,” said Numair without dulling the blow at all. Constant was furious at him for this; couldn’t he see how much he was hurting Sav!? “I don’t know why. If all goes well, I hope to find out. I’d be taking a very hard look at whoever taught you how to bind, though. My guess is the answer to any questions you have are there.”

Daine made a low, furious noise. But Sav didn’t even look at her, just sunk deeper into the chair with his head in his hands. Constant wanted to comfort him, but he didn’t know how. He wasn’t dead. He was here. Couldn’t Sav see it wasn’t so bad? Besides, if he’d been hurt by Sav’s magic, it wasn’t because Sav meant …

Constant swallowed.

Fire burns because it’s its nature to, he thought, taking a step away from the chair where his brother sat buckled over.

Numair coughed. It took a while to stop.

“You know the King’s Champion?” Daine asked, sounding awed.

Numair nodded, but there was a flicker of familiar curiosity on his features even as he sank deeper into the bed. “You say King’s Champion, despite her being Tortallan,” he said. “Does Galla not have an equivalent or is that term Tortall only?”

“We have the Gift instead of a Champion,” said Sav, his voice muffled by his hands. “Me. Our knights are trinkets, pretties to jewel the kingdom with. They are not a fighting force.”

Constant shoved his uneasiness aside. This was his brother. Sav wasn’t fire; he was human. His nature wasn’t to burn, accidentally or otherwise. But he could hurt, and be hurt, and he _was_ hurting. That was what mattered.

With that, Constant walked forward and put his hand on his brother’s shoulder. Sav looked at him.

“I love you,” said Constant awkwardly, the words clumsy on his tongue. It was about then that he realised he didn’t say it much either. “I just thought you should know.”

Sav didn’t answer, but he did reach up to where Constant’s hand sat upon his shoulder, resting his own hand atop it. And he smiled, though it was sad.

“This is very lovely,” said Numair from the bed, “and I really hope you two continue being precious to each other later because the gods know you both need it, but I’m not done. There’s still the small matter of saving my life to discuss.”

All three of them looked at him, surprised.

“What?” demanded Numair. “Did you really think I was going to die so easily?”


	14. A Long-Awaited Understanding

Though they hated being told so, once Savigny agreed to Numair’s plan Daine and Constant agreed to stay away until it was done. Neither Numair nor Savigny wanted them nearby in case it went wrong. Numair asked to be left alone before they began so he could prepare. Ostensibly, he said it was because the potential for his death was high – which was true – but also because he needed advice of his own.

He took up the mirror that Constant had bought him, smiling when he found that the back was etched with a stylised heraldic image of a hawk, and used his depleted Gift to call for Alanna. The days of sleep he’d had had been excellent for his Gift, which had recovered from its decimation quite well until the pneumonia had set in. How ironic, that he would die with enough Gift to heal himself twelve times over if only he could use it to do so without turning himself into the human equivalent of what was left of the Hartholms’ stables.

To his giddiest relief, Alanna’s face appeared in the mirror that was cupped in his hands. He brought her in line with his own gaze. It looked as though she was on the road still in the early morning, as he could see that her face was red from scrubbing and what moved behind her was the bustling of a camp being broken down.

“Give me a moment,” she told him, moving away from the chaos. When she reappeared, she appeared stressed. “What’s going on? Why are you sitting in the dark?”

He realised the oil lamp he had shuttered beside him was barely doing anything to light his face, grimacing as he reached over to open it more. There was no way he was staggering his way to the heavy curtains to open those again. He’d already tried that once to look at the stable. Not again.

Looking back at the mirror, he found Alanna giving her most furious glare. Being Alanna, this was alarming. He recoiled.

“I don’t understand how you’ve managed to take _less than a week_ to completely ignore everything I told you,” she said in a tone like she was about to lean through the mirror and knock him on the head. “How did you get _sicker_ so _quickly_?”

“Exceeding expectations,” he replied. Before she could shout, he cut her off. “I need your advice. Savigny, he has the Gift. It’s strong though he’s been badly trained in it and whoever taught him left nasty tricks hidden in his techniques. But he’s all I have, and I need him to heal me.”

“Is he a healer?” Alanna asked, narrowing her purple eyes. How Roger of Conte had ever dared to cross her, Numair would never know. That stare would make even him think twice about infuriating her, though he seemed to have no trouble accidentally doing so. 

“No,” admitted Numair. “I have the knowledge but not the ability. He has the ability but no knowledge. I’ve never been on the giving side of using the Gift to transfer knowledge from mind to mind, but you described having had someone do so to you. Is that an option here?”

Alanna bit her lip. “Gods, Numair,” she said, expression distant as she worked through it in her mind. “For something as complex as healing? Abstract concepts are melted down through the process and healing, that requires a foundation. How can he heal what he doesn’t understand?”

“I can pass on anatomical understanding too,” Numair began, but Alanna was shaking her head.

“Bodies are a collective of complex systems,” she warned, “changing the lungs changes the flow of blood which in turn changes the brain. And unfocused healing, who knows what will be altered. You’ll have to not only pass enough knowledge that he doesn’t burn your lungs out instead of healing them, but you’ll also need to influence his Gift as he’s channelling it to contain it to the area you need it contained to. He won’t have control and it will be exhausting for you. There’ll be spill over.”

“That’s extremely an intimate process.”

“Yes, it is. And dangerous for him. I know you wouldn’t use that intimacy to take advantage of someone, but an unscrupulous mage could. If he’s aware of that and he doesn’t trust you, he’ll rightfully hesitate. You seem aware enough. How important is it that he heal you now?”

“Very,” said Numair quietly. He’d turned his Gift inward already. It had been the first thing he’d done. A fever would take his mind within days and that would be it; his life would be in the hands of the Fates. He didn’t like trusting the Fates. They seemed inexplicably biased against him.

Alanna nodded. She accepted his statement without question, which he appreciated. 

“Then do what you can. Can’t you go five minutes out of my sight without disaster befalling you?”

He smiled at her, which somehow didn’t seem to cheer her up. “But imagine how dull life would be without me!” he pointed out. 

This didn’t help her mood either. 

Somehow.

Numair felt his own smile vanish as he recalled his responsibilities. “In case something goes wrong –” he started, cut off by Alanna’s startled, “Numair!” “No, shh. Don’t scold, this is important. I’ve given Savigny instructions to escort Daine and his brother, Constant, to Raoul at Sinthya in the event of my impairment, and for Raoul to bring them to you. You said George had some understanding of strange influences upon his people’s Gifts on their return from Galla? I think I’ve found a potential source.”

As Alanna listened, her attention captured by this introduction, Numair described the way Savigny’s bindings had been turned against his brother once strained.

“Savigny stated that he had no knowledge the binds would be dangerous, and I believe him,” Numair finished with. “But similar bindings are on Daine. If he comes to you, you can undo them and further our understanding of how they could be used against us. There’s the potential to learn more from Savigny too. He’ll do anything to keep her safe, I suspect.”

“George would be as happy as kittens in milk to have me do so,” said Alanna. “But I’d prefer circumstances didn’t require it since you’d do a better job than me, for sure. I don’t have your sideways brain when it comes to tricky Gifts.”

“Sometimes coming at things from the front is all you need,” he reminded her.

“But having people who can do both is always better,” she retorted, which he knew was her way of telling him not to be reckless and throw himself away when the kingdom needed them both. He was fluent in Alanna by now. “You do know that I’m mad at you for this, right? You couldn’t have waited until we had a healer in place?”

“Of course not,” he said glibly. “Since when have I ever made things easy? Anyway, time to go. Things to do, healers to train. The Black God to avoid.”

“Fine.” She rubbed her eyes before grimacing at him. “Let me tell you what you need to know first. I suppose you don’t want me to repeat how nice it would be if you didn’t die, do you?”

“Absolutely not,” said Numair. “I do my best work when being bullied.”

Savigny was understandably uncertain about the process. Numair explained it as explicitly as he could, very aware that if the man baulked now there was little else that could be done.

“I’ve been taught to never allow another mage access to my Gift with very few exceptions,” said Savigny. He was sitting on a chair he’d brought in by the fire, fiddling with a length of yarn he kept wrapping around his hand and then unwrapping and balling up before repeating the process.

“Yet, you bound Constant and Daine,” said Numair.

“Daine with permission,” snapped Savigny. “And Constant was a child. If I erred –”

“You did,” Numair said.

“ _If_ I erred, I did so to save him from Daine’s fate. You haven’t seen her lost yet. It’s dreadful. How was I to explain to him that I bound him to save his life when he was too young to truly understand? All he’d have cared about was his cursed hawks.”

“One of these days, you must allow me to meet with your teacher,” Numair said with false nonchalance. “He has such an interesting approach to training his students. To teach them personal agency regarding their own Gifts, but also to disregard the agency of others –”

“A _child_ has no agency over their Gift.” Savigny wound the yarn around his hand once more, tight enough that Numair could see it influencing circulation. “Not when it comes to the adults responsible for them.”

“A moral understanding I assume you also learned from your teacher,” Numair guessed, feeling validated when Savigny failed to meet his eyes. “Galla’s finest, indeed.”

“I didn’t intend to hurt my brother. I would _never_ hurt my brother, and I cannot fathom how the bindings acted to do so. They never did with Daine even when her magic tested them, and Cole was involved with the placement of them from the moment Daine agreed to them when she was fifteen. That’s ten years they could have hurt her but didn’t, with Cole overseeing them the whole time. I’m sorry, Salmalín, but you must be wrong about the cause of Constant’s … injury. Perhaps the Stormwings hurt him. Haven’t they magic of their own?” 

There was Cole again, Numair noted. He was starting to get an extremely unhappy notion about this man and his approach to the children placed under his care.

Briefly, conversation was stalled as Numair broke into a long spurt of coughing that exhausted him. The silence that followed was caused by Numair being too tired to speak and Savigny being unwilling to, but Numair spent it thinking. He heard Savigny get up and begin pacing.

“There must be another way …” Savigny was muttering to himself. Finally, he turned to Numair. “Are you certain this is the only way to help you?”

Numair nodded.

“We don’t need to rush,” he said, sensing panic in the other man. “It’s a personal process, I understand. We’re essentially strangers, and we’re beginning this on the wrong foot with me pecking at you. We have time to talk, if that will put you at ease.”

“What on the Goddess’s green earth about?”

Numair, cautiously, said, “Anything. Whatever you want. You said you’d be foolish to trust me when we met. Well, I’d be a fool to mislead you now. All I can do is hope that the kindness you’ve shown me the past few weeks will extend a little further, for Daine and Constant’s sake as well as my own.”

Savigny watched him for some time before turning to grab the chair and drag it beside Numair’s bed, slumping into it. They eyed each other uneasily before he spoke again.

“You’re involved with the Tortallan court,” said Sav. It wasn’t a question. “You must be, if you’re close with the King’s Champion.”

“Yes,” said Numair simply. There was absolutely no point lying. “We’re friends. You saw what happened in your courtyard. No sensible ruler would let a mage of my power go unnoticed in their kingdom. I’m primarily an academic, though. Not a Tortallan battle mage.”

Savigny looked unsurprised. “What did happen in my courtyard?”

Numair swallowed some water before committing to answering, soothing his dry throat.

“Constant said his eagle, his Pippy, she attacked the Stormwing that lunged at him,” he said, recounting what he’d surmised had occurred up there from what Constant had managed to retain, which was little. “Constant doesn’t seem to know what happened next, but from the state of his clothes and from what I saw, my belief is the Stormwing injured her for her courage. Magic responds to the user’s emotions and intent. If Constant was already in a volatile state, anxious for his friend and frightened of losing someone he cares about, his magic may have been pulled from him and into his eagle, drawn by her need.”

“I’ve never heard that happening,” said Savigny, frowning.

“Haven’t you?” Numair asked. “Daine says she healed a horse once, and she seemed so surprised about having done so I very much doubt she attempted it on purpose. Wild magic is a very strange magic. There are a number of these strange magics or queer Gifts about, perhaps a handful every generation. It’s my belief they’re essentially by-products of contact between gods and chosen humans. Wild magic perhaps being the oldest example of this, though I’ve read of odd magics surrounding dust-spinners and even ball lightning.”

Savigny was staring at him.

“You really _are_ an academic,” he said, sounding as disappointed as Constant had been when Numair had turned from hawk to man. 

“I am, sorry,” said Numair with a wheezy smile. It was unsettling how wet his breathing was. He’d never realised just how much he was taking air for granted. “Whatever the origin of wild magic is, both Daine and Constant have indicated theirs is quite capable of using them if they fail to control it. In Constant’s case, this strained your bindings beyond what they were capable of withstanding and they shattered, violently. I don’t know why, or how it happened when you didn’t intend it, but the easiest explanation is that you were taught a technique that was designed to do so without your knowledge.”

Savigny murmured something too softly for Numair to hear, looking away as he did so.

“Pardon?” Numair asked, leaning forward.

Savigny just shook his head.

“I was told Constant was dead,” he said, yanking the yarn tighter around his fingers. He was sitting close enough to Numair that Numair could, and did, reach out to close his fingers around the yarn, tugging it free from Savigny’s grip and releasing his poor fingers.

“He was,” said Numair as gently as he could, taking the yarn back to his lap and making a quick cradle with it as Savigny watched. It wasn’t very effective seeing as only one of Numair’s hands was mobile. “I … it’s hard to explain. His heart was stopped, and I started it again before that death had reached the rest of him. There’s a thin few minutes post heart death where the body can be salvaged, sometimes, if the healer is reckless and determined. But I pay for my large Gift. I cannot heal with it because of its power.”

“Unless you bleed that power away first,” said Savigny.

Numair shook his head. “It’s what I did this time, yes, and it’s why your courtyard is how it is, but it’s not a viable technique in the future. There’s a hair-thin balance between too much power and not enough, and on either side someone dies. I only did it then because if I hadn’t –”

“Constant would be dead.”

Numair nodded. He set the yarn down.

“And now you’re like this,” breathed Savigny, leaning back in the chair and looking up at the ceiling as though he hoped for some answer to be painted above. “I owe you my life.”

Numair laughed, though it was a poor attempt at the sound.

“I saved your brother’s life, not yours,” he pointed out.

Savigny didn’t look down. He just said, “The concepts are one and the same,” and kept staring up. Numair wasn’t going to look up to see what he was staring at. He thought he might drown in his own humid lungs if he tried. Instead, he readjusted his splinted arm and attempted a more intricate cat’s cradle. It seemed doomed to fail with him only having one functional elbow. Finally, Savigny spoke again: “If it’s so dangerous, why did you do it? You’ve known him not even a month. Why risk death for a Gallan boy, a stranger to you? I just don’t understand what makes him worth such a gamble.”

Numair replied, honestly, much how he had with the badger all those weeks ago. “He deserves his life,” he said. “Every human does. I wasn’t going to see it taken from him.”

Savigny looked at him, really looked at him. That looking lasted for longer than its actual duration, it felt. Numair wondered what the man was seeing.

“Very well,” said Savigny. “Show me what to do.”

It was two hours later and something was wrong.

“Slow down,” Numair instructed Savigny. He was watching the way Savigny pulled on his Gift as he used it to feel the way Numair’s body functioned, making sure there were no nasty surprises lurking in the other man’s technique. So far, Savigny’s Gift had been surprising only in one aspect: Savigny had astonishingly precise control. “Do it again.”

Savigny nodded. His hand was resting over the centre of Numair’s chest, atop his sweat-soaked cotton shirt. They hadn’t tried the information exchange yet, Numair trying to get an idea of how Savigny worked in order to instruct him more effectively. It was an anxious process, and despite barely using his Gift even Savigny was beginning to sweat. 

As Numair watched, a perfectly formed tendril of Gift moved with surgical precision from Savigny’s palm to Numair’s chest, the pull of the Gift from Savigny’s core measured out so the man was using what he needed and not an iota more. It was the first hint Numair had gotten that Savigny was trained by an exceptional Gift-user, and it also reminded him that he had no idea of Savigny’s actual raw power. Someone with such fantastic control as Savigny would mask without thought. But as soon as the rose Gift struck the barrier of Numair’s skin, it spilled back. It couldn’t seem to break through. And Savigny was tiring faster than he should, his hand trembling and the muscles in his outstretched arm twitching in a spasmodic fashion.

“You’re just exploring,” Numair soothed, watching Savigny’s face now. The man’s pale eyes were closed, his mouth pulled tight as though he was concentrating hard. His breathing, though, was deep and slow. Mediative. Trained. “All you’re feeling for is the lungs. Ignore everything else. You want to feel for how they work, the inhale drawing everything in … the exhale pushing oxygen through the body. Feel it in yourself, your own deep breathing, and then compare that to mine. Recognise where the body is fighting its own battles and you’ll save your Gift a lot of trouble because you can just accentuate what nature is already doing.”

“I’m not getting it,” Savigny muttered, his fingers scrunching against Numair’s shirt. “I feel your Gift. That’s it.”

“You’re not used to pushing your Gift below the skin of another person without influencing their Gift, or aiming for physical harm,” Numair surmised. “Just go slow. There’ll be a feel of resistance, but you can push through without harming me if you’re careful and aware. Time it with my breathing if it helps. As I inhale, enter with the air.”

He inhaled deeply, Sav leaning closer with his eyes still closed, listening for that inhale. Again, Numair felt the curious nudge of Sav’s pointed Gift at his skin, but again it was foiled. The breath ended and Sav pulled back, exhaling as though he’d been holding his air as well. 

“Again,” said Numair.

He inhaled, feeling the Gift surge, contact, hold … and then fall back. This time, however, neither of them gave up. Savigny held the thread in place as Numair exhaled, coughed, and then – when he had his air back – tried once more.

Nothing.

“It’s not working,” snapped Savigny, taking his hand back. Numair went to tell him to be patient, but: “Take your shirt off.”

Numair blinked.

“You only ever needed to ask,” he said with a shrewd grin that was probably ruined by how peaky he knew he looked right now, Savigny’s expression unamused. “Though I imagine this is because you’re hoping skin contact will help rather than a desire to see me shirtless?”

“I’ve seen you shirtless,” Savigny responded.

There was a beat of expectant silence.

“What?” said Savigny, annoyed. 

“I was waiting for you to say, ‘I wasn’t impressed’ or some further glib comment on my body,” said Numair. “I was bracing for it. I’m a delicate man, I take these comments to heart.”

There was another beat.

“Just take your shirt off,” repeated Savigny.

“Why the whole shirt?” Numair asked, sly. He wasn’t at his finest form, but it amused him to see the sour faced Savigny so flustered. “Couldn’t you just reach … under?”

Savigny stared. “Are you _flirting_ while potentially dying of pneumonia?” he asked, dumbfounded.

“I don’t know,” said Numair, beaming. “You’re the one asking me to take my shirt off. I can only assume it’s because, oh, what did Daine say? You think I’m _glitter_.”

Savigny smiled, that smile the darkest and most foreboding smile Numair had ever seen on a man so clearly amused. “Take the shirt off,” he said again in his hoitiest toitiest noble voice. “You’re a ridiculous creature. How you’re still alive, I cannot fathom.”

“It’s because of my buckets of charm,” Numair confessed. “People want me to stay alive so they can flirt with me. Tragic, but true.”

“I’m not flirting with you.” Savigny leaned closer, and his smile changed in some imperceptible, exhilarating way. The effect was vivifying; Numair’s interest was thoroughly vivified. “When I flirt, you’ll know.”

“Is that a promise?” asked Numair curiously.

Savigny gave an insouciant shrug. 

Numair took it as one anyway, managing the buttons of his shirt one-handed as Savigny watched. There had been a discernible shift in the dynamic between them within the last few minutes towards something that was, to Numair, much more familiar than the suspicion and mistrust that had lurked under a veer of circumspection beforehand. Attraction he could work with.

While he was distracted contemplating this, Savigny had moved from the chair to the bed so he could lay his hand upon Numair’s chest, this time without the shirt between their skin. Numair sucked in a breath. Savigny’s hand was ice cold, Numair’s skin goose-pimpling below the touch.

“You’re warm,” Savigny noted with a frown, the undercurrent of interest vanishing from his expression as he reached to brush the back of his hand against Numair’s forehead.

Numair, feeling unwell, spoke without thought.

“You smell nice,” he noted. Savigny looked at him. “What? It’s not flirting if it’s true. Do I have a fever? I think I might have a fever. We should probably hurry up. Try again.”

Grumbling, Savigny splayed his unreasonably cold hand across Numair’s chest, closing his eyes and focusing on his Gift.

Numair inhaled. Exhaled. Watched Savigny’s Gift. They repeated this process.

And again. 

And again.

Numair’s eyes felt dry, sore. He focused his own Gift on Savigny’s so he could close his eyes as they worked. Inhale, exhale. Each time, it _almost_ felt like they were going to make it; each time, they failed. For whatever reason, Savigny couldn’t figure out the intent he needed to even begin to heal. It was worrying. If healing wasn’t an ability the Gods had seen fit to allow Savigny access to, forcing it would be harmful. But it didn’t feel like Savigny wouldn’t have the ability to heal, once it was shaped knowingly; it felt like he was flinching. Or his focus was shaken by something. Exhaustion, perhaps, though he seemed fresh enough. Illness was out. He seemed perfectly healthy. Which left …

 _– Pain –_ snapped the badger. Numair almost leapt out of his skin with shock, launching upright to find the badger pacing in an irritable circle by the roaring fire. Savigny’s eyes were shut and he was perfectly still, his fingers only very gently tracing Numair’s skin. He seemed unaware of their visitor, or Numair’s activity, breathing evenly with his rose-Gift covering his skin in a glowing shield over his entire body. It was as though he was meditating. Or frozen.

“What did you do to him?” Numair asked, uneasy. He was awake. It made the fact that there was a _god_ stalking a rug-length away from him very real, even if the musky stink of badger wasn’t enough to warn him. “Savigny?”

– _You are a disappointment, long nose_ – growled the badger, sitting up onto his haunches and baring sharp, white teeth in Numair’s direction. – _When you found the girl so fast, I expected better of you. She should be better already, but her mind still seethes with chaos. She can’t even see me standing before her!_ –

“I’m working on removing the bindings –”

The badger rumbled. Numair closed his mouth. 

– _They’re the least of our worries!_ –

“You said the bindings were spoiling her magic and that’s why she couldn’t hear you. I’ve been focused on them. What _have_ you done to Savigny?” Numair, unhappily, wrapped his fingers around Savigny’s still wrist and felt for a pulse, which he found. He didn’t take his fingers away though. It was soothing to know the man was alive, as motionless as he was under his mask of coloured fire.

– _The bindings are a moment’s work for a mage like you. I’m astounded they’re still in place. No, you fool human, the spoiling is in her mind. Did you honestly believe this mage’s damaged magic would be enough to block a human from a God?_ –

Put like that, Numair truly did feel a fool. He couldn’t tell if he was blushing or if it was the fever, his face feeling unduly hot considering how cold he’d been just a moment ago.

The badger huffed, settling down and glancing at the fire. – _Never mind. You’ve been unwell. Perhaps I was unreasonable, setting such high expectations of a simple mortal._ –

“Pardon me for existing,” Numair said frostily. 

The badger ignored him, trundling over to the bed and hauling himself up onto his hind legs to peer myopically at Savigny. 

– _Pain_ – he said again, gruffer this time. – _I thought you’d seen it. Well, it’s obvious you’re going to be no use to me until you’ve recovered from the mess your ill-thought out hawk-shape made of you, so here. I’ll tell you. The mage’s Gift burns him._ –

Numair blinked. Then he looked at Savigny, baffled. He couldn’t see …

– _This nation perverts their Gifts_ – the badger said, shaking his blocky head in a humanlike fashion. – _Their particular God has been kept from them these last thirteen years and its beginning to show. Others begin to seep into his territory. I warned him his absence would do his creatures harm, but does he listen to me? Look closer, mage._ –

Numair didn’t have to. He’d spotted it. Now he sat in shame, hot with horror at what he’d almost done. Savigny’s Gift was lousy with someone else’s almost-invisible workings seeded throughout it, so grossly infested that Numair felt ill looking directly at it. It was no excuse that he hadn’t laid these binds. Numair was a black robe mage; this was a grievous oversight. They weren’t coloured with the fire of the mage who’d laid them, as Savigny’s had been over Daine’s and Constant’s allowing Numair to spot it easily, but the distorted pattern of the man’s Gift should have warned Numair to look closer. Here, he’d been ready to scold Savigny like the man was a naughty child for not realising what his bindings would do to Constant if forced, but Numair had almost done the same.

– _Never mind_ – said the badger, his tone softer now. – _Any kit can tell you’ve not been well for some time. This is what I get for hoisting divine problems onto humans._ –

“Why didn’t he tell me?” Numair rasped. He couldn’t tell what the infestation in Savigny’s Gift was supposed to achieve, and he wasn’t willing to ask the badger to wake him in order for Numair to find out. He already sensed that, had Savigny not unconsciously held back from forcing himself to heal, it would have hurt him severely if it hadn’t already.

– _Have you ever seen a living tree grow around an arrow shot into the bark?_ –

Numair nodded.

– _Picture that, but a child’s Gift. He’s likely never known anything other than pain when using it. Disgusting. I’m not supposed to interfere, but it infuriates me seeing magic used for such. And this is small._ –

The badger breathed onto Savigny, who shuddered. His eyes flickered under their closed lids, but he didn’t wake up. His Gift, however, rippled as though the breath was a wave washing over it. When it was over, the subtle distortions in the patterns of Savigny’s Gift, buried so deep below the rose that Numair hadn’t seen them, were gone. All that was left was the focused glow of healthy magic.

– _There_ – said the badger. – _My kit is your responsibility though, as is your illness. This one will be able to help you without the foul Gift biting him for it, however._ – He hesitated, eyeing Numair with something almost like reticence. – _How is she?_ –

Numair, distracted by neurotically checking Savigny for signs of the tainted Gift remaining, said, “Who?” before he attended to what the badger was saying. “Daine?”

The badger nodded.

“If you’re so worried about her, you’re a god. Can’t you …?”

– _Meddle_ – said the badger. – _No. Why do you think I bother with you? Stop fussing over him. He’s clean. I’ve picked off meaner ticks in the past than that mess. When he wakes, tell him you groomed him free of the pests. Once he realises what that means, he’ll be grateful, and you’ll have an ally. You’ll need it._ –

“Why?” asked Numair.

– _Why, why, why, why. You mortals waste so much limited time asking why instead of listening to your betters. It’s exhausting. Hmph. And cool this room down, fool._ –

Just like that, he was gone.

Savigny sighed, as though he was letting out a breath he’d been holding for some time. He almost tipped forward into Numair’s lap, looking drowsy and confused.

“Did I do it?” he asked, looking at his hand which had drifted free of contact with Numair. He stared at his fingers, puzzled. “What happened?”

“No, I did something,” Numair lied. “You had a strange Gift over yours. I removed it. How do you feel?”

Savigny stilled. This was a much more human motionlessness than what the badger had thrown on him, however, and Numair waited it out without panic.

“Try it,” Numair suggested with idle disregard, feigning disinterest. “I don’t know what the odd Gift was doing, but you should at least be able to cast easier now. Was there resistance before?”

“No,” said Savigny, his voice a whisper. He turned his hand palm up, breathing fast. 

A tiny flame burst into life on his fingertips, glittering and bright.

Savigny’s eyes went wide, wondering. He looked captivated. Stunned.

Numair’s stomach twisted, hard. It was such a small magic, a minuscule use of the man’s Gift. Yet, Savigny was astounded to have been able to do it without it harming him. They’d been here for hours trying to heal, drawing on Savigny’s Gift relentlessly, a hundred times harder than a tiny ball of mage-light. 

“There,” Numair said, his nonchalance cracking despite his best efforts. He couldn’t help it. It was a terrible pleasure to have seen such a great harm undone, and equally as terrible to realise just how great that harm had been. Savigny looked at him. His eyes were uncomfortably bright. Numair’s faked disinterest cracked further: “That does look easier. We can take a break, if you’d like. I need to sleep.”

Savigny, voice still soft but now also disbelieving, managed, “The Gods sent you. They must have.”

Numair knew this time the heat in his cheeks was him blushing.

“In a roundabout way,” he admitted. “A break –”

Savigny was shaking his head. “No,” he said, the whisper gone along with the dangerously bright eyes. Now he just seemed exhilarated. “I can do it now. Let’s do it now.”

“Very well,” said Numair.

It wasn’t pretty. Savigny’s perfect focus was only perfect when he knew what it was focusing on. Though there wasn’t as much spill-over as there could have been had Numair been using a less-diligent mage as a conduit for his healing knowledge, there was some. But it was done.

Numair, sleepy but _ecstatic_ over the breath in his lungs, the coolness of his skin, and the clarity of his thoughts, patted Savigny gently on the shoulder. The other man was curled on his side in the bed beside Numair, one hand over his face and the other pulled around his head. If Numair was sleepy, Savigny was beyond exhausted. Despite this, Numair could see the corner of a dreamy smile from under that hand.

“Was that so bad?” Numair asked the weary mage, who made a non-committal noise into his arm. “Any of it, I mean. My passing the knowledge to you, or the actual healing. Any pain?”

Savigny shifted his hand, eyeing Numair from between his fingers.

“None,” he said. “I’m just tired. Is it always like that?”

Numair, confused, gestured for him to continue.

“So …” Savigny looked for the word, rolling onto his back and watching Numair prod at his broken arm. “It felt good, powerful. Easy. It felt easy?”

Numair winced. He’d unwound the splint and tenderly tried to stretch his arm out, but his muscles weren’t used to the weight after weeks of a sling. Propping himself on one elbow, Savigny helped, taking the weight of Numair’s arm while Numair straightened it. Hissing through his teeth, Numair sucked in a breath. Here, there was pain. The breaks in his arm had healed, but badly. He’d have a limited range of motion until Alanna could fix it, if she could. 

But he was alive.

“No, it’s not always easy,” he said, lowering his arm with a groan. “And we still need to find out if there’s anything else you’ve learned with hidden nastiness in it, so don’t go casting wildly. Did you mean to heal the bones in my arm?”

Savigny shook his head. 

“Spill-over,” muttered Numair, letting himself fall back into the bed. “We’ll work on that.”

“You’ll teach me too?” Savigny sounded surprised. “I thought … you only seemed inclined to help Daine and Constant.”

“You’ve got too much promise not to,” said Numair, thinking of the badger. In the god’s own way, he’d implied Savigny was important to helping Daine. Numair took another deep, clean breath and revelled in it.

“Thank you,” said Savigny quietly. “Your sheets are disgusting, by the way.”

“So am I,” admitted Numair, looking down at himself. Even his chest was streaked with sweat and the room smelled awful despite them having doused the fire and opened the windows to cool it, magic working better in a chilled space. Something Numair hadn’t thought of and now, with the clarity of a functional brain, felt silly for having forgotten. “You can leave, you know. Let me grovel in my filth until my legs remember they have bones in them and are capable of motion.”

Savigny mumbled, “Too tired,” and covered his face again.

Chuckling, Numair let him be. They lie there beside each other. Neither spoke for some time. For so long, in fact, that Numair glanced over to Savigny, worried by the quiet.

He was asleep. Asleep, he made more sense. He looked softer. It was a softness that fit better into the shape of the man Numair was beginning to see under all the bristling anger and grumpy insolence, the shape of the man who Numair could feasibly understand Daine being so close to. At the thought of Daine, Numair remembered what the badger had said of her: it wasn’t the bindings that were hurting her as much as her own chaos and pain were. That, he now realised, was a familiar story. It was written all over the man beside him too. Numair felt a slow, rare anger building. If the anger and the pain were the same in both Savigny and Daine, who’d grown up together, it seemed likely there was a singular source.

 _A child’s Gift,_ the badger had said. Savigny’s disregard of a child’s sense of self, their right to their own agency. The bindings that Savigny had been taught, meant to hurt. And Savigny, who was supposed to take a position as the country’s greatest mage, placed as a child with a mage whose magic, Numair suspected, was cruel. Elspeth had suggested there were powers working in the shadows within Galla to cripple the kingdom; he was beginning to realise just how in the centre of it he’d landed. But the idea that these plots had been building for so long, and that they could have begun with a deliberate crippling of an innocent child’s Gift …

Numair was never a man who could abide cruelty, but he was even less so when it was someone vulnerable being hurt by someone who was supposed to care for them. He’d _seen_ what being denied love and compassion could do to people who were hurt instead of cherished.

He wasn’t sure he was capable of undoing years of that hurt in the relatively short time he’d be spending here with them, but he knew he was going to try. 

“Hey, Savigny,” he whispered, just in case the other man wasn’t as asleep as he seemed, “I think you’re glitter too.”


	15. Winging It

“Good morning!” bellowed Numair, bursting into the kitchen – as much as anyone could burst when every door was propped open – with a celebratory lift of his arms. Life was excellent. He was healthy, his lungs were spectacular, his arm only bothered him if he unreasonably tried to use it for arm functions, and today he was going to teach some _magic_. He added, “What a fine and lovely day to learn!” in an equally loud bellow, just to keep them on their toes.

Despite it being early morning, which was traditionally not a time that Numair found acceptable, the kitchen wasn’t empty. Constant was cooking something which seemed to involve a lot of eggs and squinting, and Savigny was aggressively slumped over several small mounds of paperwork at the heavy table. There was a mug of something steaming by his hand, the contents a mysterious frothy tan. His posture was decidedly defeated.

“Hi, Numair,” beamed Constant.

Savigny muttered into the table.

“Good morning!” Numair bellowed again at Savigny. He leaned over the man’s shoulder and sniffed the drink, which had a lingering sweet scent overpowering the alcoholic undertones. “Why are you drinking spiced rum at dawn?”

“Why _aren’t_ you drinking rum at dawn?” Savigny snapped back, glowering. He seemed tired.

“Ah,” said Numair with a condescending nod. “I see you’re not a morning person.”

This earned him no answer, just Savigny snatching the mug from under Numair’s nose and sipping moodily from it. Numair looked at the books. They were a complicated series of accounts, littered with sums in ornate handwriting. Numair was exempt from taxes due to his services to the Crown earning him a Royal salary, but he’d bothered Alanna enough while she’d raged at her own books – too proud to let George hire them an accountant – that he recognised what he was looking at. There were the stubs of candles suggesting just how long Savigny had been toiling at it.

Numair decided to start the day off right with a generous offer of assistance. 

“I’m excellent at maths,” he lied optimistically, figuring it couldn’t be that hard to master maths if he’d already figured out complex arcane magic, “and you look like you’ve been here for hours. Let me help.”

Over the past week and a half of Numair’s swift return to the land of the alive, he and Savigny had found a cautious understanding of each other. Numair had been surprised. The reveal of his closeness to a foreign court, he’d thought, would surely create friction with the young Marquis, but Savigny didn’t seem at all perturbed. Life had simply continued, if now with Numair awake and aware instead of languishing his time away. Other than that, it had been a span of boredom broken up only by alerting Alanna to his survival, pretending not to see her raw relief, and by plotting when to begin his promised lessons with the captive audience he’d amassed.

Savigny moved slightly over on the bench, allowing Numair to sit close beside him. He offered Numair a sip from his mug without a word, but Numair declined. Alcohol was never something he partook in, but particularly not before even the birds were awake.

“Do you want an eggy surprise?” asked Constant.

Numair blinked.

“It’s eggs fried in butter with surprises added,” Constant continued, tilting the heavy pan so Numair could see the mass of egg, hot butter, and spices he’d tipped within. Onion too, from the smell, and something sharply scented. “It’s nice! Usually. Sometimes I add things that don’t work. I never know until I try it, which is why it’s a surprise.”

“You might as well,” said Savigny, who was studying his ink-drenched fingers. “Constant’s a decent cook, if inventive.”

Numair consented to the ‘eggy surprise’, much to Constant’s delight, and then turned back to the account books. This close, Savigny smelled like a late night: like mustiness and rum and sour clothes. For the first time that Numair had seen, his face was lightly stubbled. Usually he was fastidious about being clean-shaven. 

“We’re starting lessons today,” Numair told them both, taking the quill from Savigny and dipping it in the inkwell before altering an incorrect sum he’d spotted. He frowned at the page as he spoke, his brain struggling with what it was seeing. “Constant, I’m going to take you and Daine out to see what your capabilities with familiar animals are. Do you know any we can visit?”

Constant looked faint from happiness. “Loads,” he said dreamily. “We can go see the hawks, and the baker’s kittens, and Eloise’s hounds? And our horses. And Pippy! Will Daine like that though?”

“She can take her time,” Numair promised. He had to take the binding off her today now he felt – finally – at full strength once more. As soon as she joined them, he intended to do so. “There’ll be meditation before we leave. I want to see how you’ve both done with the exercises I set you last week.”

Constant looked guilty. Savigny yawned.

“You’d better sleep while we’re gone because I want to investigate some of your techniques as well,” Numair warned him, before prodding the book with his thumb. “Why is this column listed as ‘Crían Household Staff’? Is that this household?”

He gestured around them, to the dusty kitchen and also to Constant who was enthusiastically serving up four plates of ‘eggy surprise’.

“Is that _this_ staff?” he teased.

“Savigny still pays our staff,” Constant explained when Savigny didn’t, skidding their plates across to them and almost covering ‘Income Expenses’ with buttered eggs. “He says it’s hard enough finding work and it’s not their fault we let them go, so they still pull a wage from us.”

Numair looked at Savigny, who was busying himself looking everywhere but at Numair.

“We can afford it,” he finally muttered. “We have a steward who handles Hartholm Fief’s finances and I pay the staff here from our passive incomes, from our parents. I don’t use the fief’s money.”

“Wait, so this book is your income?” Numair asked, puzzled. “So what is this, the expense labelled ‘feed’? Feed for _what_? This is hundreds of crowns worth and you have no horses.”

“We have two horses,” Constant corrected quickly, opening his mouth to describe those two horses in further, no doubt excruciating, detail.

“Two horses don’t eat hundreds of crowns worth of feed,” Numair interrupted. “So this is your fief’s expenses, yes?”

Savigny stared blankly.

Numair gave up on that, dragging another one of the books towards him and trying to understand that one instead. It was equally as puzzling as the other, if not more so. All he could understand was that Hartholm Fief made an astounding amount of money from wine and wool exports, and then the columns devolved into bad maths in the same ornate handwriting as the other. 

He grabbed another scroll. This was from the crown accountants detailing the legal inheritances of Dieudonné and Rose de Hartholm following their deaths, bequeathed to the legal issues of the marriage – Savigny and Constant – as well as to the ward, Veralidaine Sarrasri. All Numair understood of what he skimmed was that the Hartholm sons would be financially supported on those incomes easily their entire lives if all they spent it on was eggs and rum and absent household staff, and that Daine should not have been starving on the street because she was passively earning more in a month than he was until she married or became financially independent in her own right.

He looked back at the book.

“I think you’ve made errors,” he guessed, squinting. 

“Nonsense,” snapped Savigny, grabbing the quill back. “I’ve been doing this alone for six years now. It’s all perfectly sound.”

“We get audited every year.” Constant had finished his eggs and was now hungrily side-eyeing Numair and Savigny’s plates, which were going cold. “Don does it personally. He says he’s raised chickens better at maths than Sav is. I told you, Sav, let _me_ do it. Adel taught me accounting for a reason. He says a lord should always know sums better than his accountant, even if the accountant actually does those sums. Too many lords get sweedled. What does sweedled mean?”

Savigny was staring at the book. Numair leaned closer.

“This says the Crown owes you three thousand crowns in taxes,” he murmured into Savigny’s ear. “I think that’s backwards from how it usually goes. Maybe you should let the boy do it.”

“No, it’s _right_ ,” said Savigny. “Hartholm earns a stipend for defence of the Scanran border. It’s perfectly sensible that we get money from the Crown.”

“Maybe,” guessed Numair, who actually had no idea, “but that’s Daine’s column, not Hartholm’s. It says _Daine_ is getting three thousand crowns. Does she personally defend Hartholm from the Scanrans? Perhaps with her bow and a fierce scowl?”

Daine herself wandered in then, dressed for the day and looking considerably brighter and cleaner than any of them except, perhaps, Constant. She didn’t open with good morning. She glanced at Savigny, then down at the books, and then scowled in the same fashion Numair fancied she used against the Scanrans.

“Sav, no,” she said, reaching across the table to slide the book out from under Savigny’s hand. “We talked about this last year. You’re banned from taxes until you learn to count. It’s going to take me and Constant hours to fix this mess now.”

“You can’t ban me from my own taxes!” Savigny, clearly, had not considered that Daine could and would. Even he recoiled from the withering stare she gave him. “Fine! Do them. They’re pointless anyway, money to a despot. I want nothing to do with the whole sordid business. I’m giving them to you to do! And I _can_ count!” 

With a flourish, he stood, drained his mug, and took himself, his musty clothes, and his rum-scent out of the room.

“I’m going to bed!” he shouted back. “Don’t wake me unless you’re Numair!”

Constant and Daine looked at Numair, Constant’s eyes wide and Daine’s amused before she began to eat her eggs, using her other hand to mark sections of the books with the quill. Her handwriting, Numair noticed, was nowhere near as fancy as Savigny’s but it was far cleaner.

“Oo-er,” said Daine, smirking. Numair didn’t know what that meant but it sounded insinuating.

“He means for lessons,” Numair said quickly. Constant looked confused, so Numair added, “Magic lessons,” for clarity.

Neither of them responded to that, though Numair could have sworn he heard Daine whisper ‘glitter’ under her breath. Numair saw no need for such silliness and, as such, ignored her in favour of his eggs. He was far too dignified to do anything else.

Meditation was doomed from the beginning. Daine was too fretful about the planned exposure to animals, getting paler and paler the longer she sat there and worked herself up in her mind. Constant was the opposite. He was so excited that he couldn’t physically sit still. The warding circle around Constant kept in the worst of his bursts of magic, but Numair could still see it as he worked with Daine.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her eyes popping open again to stare suspiciously at him. He was undoing Savigny’s bindings while she meditated, a task that he’d warned them they wouldn’t be leaving until he was finished with. “That tingled.”

“Keep meditating,” he scolded. “I might miss something if you’re wiggling around.”

Constant, who didn’t seem physically capable of not wiggling, wiggled more. “Are we done?” he complained, opening his eyes to watch them impatiently. When Numair looked at him, his eyes closed again. “Pippy wants to go. She’s _bored_.”

“Pippy can’t come,” said Daine to Constant, earning another, “Eyes closed!” from Numair. She closed her eyes but kept talking, much to Numair’s irritation. “You don’t have a glove for her. You can’t carry her through the markets ungloved and unhooded, can you imagine? She’ll eat some fancy lady’s fluff dog and frighten all the moneybags’ delicate sensibilities.”

“Don says I don’t have to hood her. He said she can fly overhead in mountains so I don’t see why it’s any different in the Jewel, since we’re on a mountain anyway. Don says –”

“Eyes closed!” bellowed Numair, channelling Sarge. “This is _very_ complex work and I need total _silence_ from the both of you, so meditate until I say or else the only excursion we’re going on is to _more meditation_. Do you both understand?”

There was silence.

“Do you understand?” Numair asked again, aggrieved by this non-response.

Constant, opening one eye, whispered, “You said we had to be silent.”

His voice was accusatory. Daine was almost smirking.

“Silent unless I ask you a direct question,” amended Numair after some careful deep breathing of his own. He’d forgotten what students could be like. Mercy be. “If I ask a direct question, I want an answer. Now, do you both understand?”

“Yes, Numair,” said Constant politely.

“Yes,” said Daine, nowhere near as politely. “But he’s still not bringing his eagle.”

Constant wailed, “No fair!”

The bickering began again.

“What did I do to deserve this?” Numair asked the gods, receiving no answer. However, when he looked down from his calming observation of the ceiling, he found both his students staring at him. “Oh, now what?”

“Did you want us to answer that one?” Daine asked him, her delightfully infuriating smile back in place. Numair inhaled sharply and, at the noise, she added an insolent, “Sir.”

He didn’t deserve this.

It was late morning by the time they left the estate. Constant led the way at his usual half-run, half-sprint, which Numair and Daine refused to emulate. This meant that he was using up his excesses of energy by running ahead as far as he could go without falling out of sight and then running back to them to complain they were too slow, which suited Numair just fine. It left him able to talk to Daine and enjoy Cría more than he had before. The weather was a perfect spring day, damp enough to stay cool despite the sun overhead. Daine seemed inclined to enjoy it as well and, since being her teacher depended on her comfort with Numair himself, he considered a sensible walk to be in line with his aims.

“I had the impression the Hartholms are reclusive,” Numair said as they walked up a street lined with artisan stores in beautiful wooden buildings, painted such a vivid range of colours that the whole effect was one of opulent magnificence. The streets were paved with patterned bricks, the gutters clean of scummer and trash. Numair, who loved luxury as much as he was aware of its rarity and frivolity, delighted in everything. 

“They are,” said Daine. She was dressed once more in Constant’s clothes. They were really all that made her stand out. She’d gained weight and vigour in the weeks since returning, now just skinny instead of wasted. “Why?”

Numair nodded to Constant, who had been waylaid by two ladies leaning out of a shop to wave him over. They were dressed in jewels and silks, fussing over his hair and the angle of his stiff collar. “He seems to know everyone,” he pointed out. Across the street, two guards in surcoats displaying a yellow thistle flower on a blue field crossed with grey waved to Constant, who waved back despite the fussing nobles.

“Oh, yes,” said Daine, a small, proud smile appearing on her nervous face. “Constant, he’s, uh. Different, I s’pose. He reminds me of those stray cats that move into a neighbourhood and pretend everyone is their family. Everyone puts a bowl of milk out and considers the cat their special friend even though he’s got a dozen homes.”

Numair couldn’t help it; he laughed. The description of Constant as a community cat was too apt, especially as they watched Constant wiggle his way away from the fussing noble ladies in order to bounce across the street and request to pet a merchant’s palomino pony. 

“It’s helpful though,” Daine continued, less amused now. Her blue-grey eyes were wary. “With Sav, I mean. He’s such an eccentric duck, I don’t think he’d get away with half of his behaviours if it weren’t for people loving Constant so much. They’d have starved years ago, at least. Do you know there’s a bunch of his staff who wait until he’s out and sneak in to make sure the potatoes aren’t rotting in the cellar and at least some of the dust is gone? Sav’s so dozy about household things, I don’t think it’s ever occurred to him that cellars don’t grow coal naturally and someone has to bring the firewood in out of the damp. Constant knows, but it’s something he’s put away in the ‘things that just happen’ part of his brain so he never wastes air talking about it.”

“I guess that’s what you get of boys raising themselves,” Numair suggested gently, inviting her to talk about her past if she so wished. She didn’t answer. He decided to be open first. “I have siblings, you know. I don’t know them very well though since I was sent to school far away quite young. Some weren’t even born until after I left, so I’ve never known them except from letters. Even so, not in years …”

He faltered, realising that he hadn’t heard from his family since fleeing Carthak. He may have more siblings now, even. Definitely nieces and nephews. Perhaps some of his siblings were married. Perhaps some were dead. How was he to know?

He swallowed.

Daine was watching Constant, who’d found a stray cat and was trying to tempt it out from behind a flowering tree. They’d rounded a corner into a square filled with wild gardens contained with tight stone borders, entertainers staking places around the square to dance and sing for the gathered nobility. Stalls set up around the edges sold hot pasties and mugs of a thick spiced barley drink; Numair saw one selling sticks of cooked meat and vegetables. Daine must have either seen him staring or heard his stomach growl, because she changed direction with a glance at Constant and walked over there.

“I don’t have siblings,” she said as they lined up behind the crowd at the stall, their conversation kept private by the overwhelming chatter around them of a winter-bound city enjoying a brief spring break. “Not from Ma, and I never knew my Da, obviously.”

“Obviously?” Numair queried.

“Sarra _sri_ ,” Daine said, misery in her voice. “Sri from Ma. It’s a bastard name. Proper born babies don’t take their Ma’s names. They get the sensible sra. Or they’re nobles and get nobility names to tie them to their lands, like Sav and Constant do.”

That sounded like an old hurt. Numair skirted it.

“The Hartholms left you an income,” he pointed out. Their conversation was briefly interrupted by Daine purchasing four of the hot meat skewers wrapped in waxed paper to keep their fingers clean. She handed three of them to Numair as they walked away from the stall to leave one of her hands free, which she put to her mouth and issued a piercing whistle. The shocked eyes of the people around them didn’t seem to bother her.

Constant appeared beside her as though by magic.

“Here,” Daine said, taking two of the skewers and giving them to him. “One for you and you better eat it all. No feeding your companions from it, understand?”

“Thanks!” Constant grabbed them both and was gone back to his cat friend, where he began ripping meat from the spare skewer to cool for it. Numair looked at Daine, eyebrows raised.

“He’d have given it his own otherwise,” Daine said defensively. “I know him. What’s the income got to do with anything? I don’t touch it.”

“Why not? They wouldn’t have left it to you if they didn’t care for you.”

“Or felt obligated,” muttered Daine, her shoulders folding in. She kept twitching, half-turning towards flocks of pigeons or passing horses before wheeling back. He suspected she was having a much more difficult time blocking animals out without Savigny’s bindings to use as a shield. He could help her with that, but not until he was invited. She needed to know how her magic felt unbound before he went ahead and blocked it again.

“Oh no, I know nobles,” said Numair. “Obligated nobles do the _bare_ minimum they need to. If they were obligated to you, they’d have given you a peasant’s wage to live on. I might not understand Savigny’s accounts, but you’re on the same income as a journeyman Crown mage in Tortall. They didn’t just set you up to survive, Daine, which is what obligation would have made them do. They’ve left you more than enough to thrive, to start your own business or pursue study wherever you please without even requiring you marry to keep it.”

“Charity,” said Daine, uneasily.

“No,” said Numair, sitting on a stone bench and gesturing for her to join him as he ate his greasy, heavily spiced meal. “I don’t know them, and I don’t know their relationship with you, but to me it looks far more like affection, if not love. Surely, Savigny would have explained it to you when he arranged your accounts …?”

Daine shook her head. She was juggling the skewer from hand to hand, licking grease from her fingers as she went. Her waxed paper she’d given to Constant in an attempt to keep him clean. Numair glanced at the boy, raising his eyebrows when he realised Constant was feeding not only three cats now but also a hawk. It didn’t look like Pippy, but Numair was at the wrong angle to see since there was a small audience of children crowding to try pet the cats too.

“Savigny never knew his parents too well,” said Daine. Numair rescued her, spreading his wax paper on the bench between them and taking her skewer to slip the meat and vegetables free to rest on the paper where she could eat them piece by piece. He did the same to his and they ate together, using their bare skewers as rudimentary forks. She continued around a piece of mushroom, “He lived at the palace with Cole before I showed up and even after, he was only really ever invited home sometimes. We only spent winter in Cría, his family and me once the palace kicked me out, and when we left to return to Hartholm he had to stay with Cole. I saw him more than his family did since when Marquess Rose returned to the palace for her duties, she often took me and I would visit him.”

Numair noted the ‘invited home’ and his heart hurt for this smaller Savigny.

“Tell me about this ‘Gift’ position in the court,” he requested, using his skewer to scoop up two serves of the mushy green-yellow vegetable that Daine seemed to be avoiding, leaving her the mushrooms. She looked unhappy at the request, so he added, “The longer you occupy me with politics, the longer it is until I make you talk to an animal. Besides, you might as well get used to answering my questions now. I didn’t have the lungs to do so before my healing, so I’ve built up plenty to pester you with.”

He wasn’t surprised that that worked. Daine’s reluctance to use her powers was going to be a complicated hurdle to surmount.

“How jolly,” she said dryly, before launching into an explanation around her mouthfuls of meat. “The Royal Gift is the Crown’s mage representative, bound to them as a symbol of the necessary divide between Crown and Gift.”

Numair frowned. “Necessary?” he asked after swallowing. He drank from his flask of water to wash it down before adding, “What’s necessary about a divide? That sounds contentious, not necessary.”

Daine shrugged. “Complicated historical bickerings, probably,” she suggested. Though it was hardly detailed, Numair would guarantee this statement was accurate, if unhelpful. “Someone hundreds of years ago decided that the Gift is corruptive and we can’t hardly have a corrupted ruler, so they made it illegal for anyone Gifted to take the throne. Mages complained they weren’t represented as they got crowded out of their lands and titles in favour of non-Gifted family lines, and there were whole things about being at a disadvantage against neighbouring countries with nasty Royal mages.” 

The grin she aimed at Numair here was, like this ‘divide’, in Numair’s opinion entirely unnecessary. There was nothing nasty about him. Maybe she was referring to Alanna, or Jon.

“So they invented the Royal Gift. S’posed to be a powerful mage chosen when they come into a full understanding of their Gift to swear themselves to the country and the throne as the ruler does, bound by sword and Gift to their monarch. That’s what we got taught anyway, and we got taught it a _lot_ , growing up with the Marquess. Idea is that if the Gift is corrupted by their magic, maybe it gets balanced out by the uncorrupted ruler, or the other way around. Don always joked that the biggest threat to him as a king would be Savigny, and he’s not wrong. Some Gifts have dethroned their rulers for being bad. It’s messy though. I don’t think Savigny would, unless Don did something unforgivable.”

Numair winced. He could imagine what ‘messy’ described. The Griffin Riot would have nothing on something like that.

“I don’t know why I wasn’t taught this back home in Tortall,” he said. It seemed very pertinent information that Jon was either unaware of or hadn’t considered important.

Daine shrugged again. “Dunno. Ask Savigny. He’d know more about that side of things. All I know is what I got taught after falling in with nobles. Growing up common, I knew the Marquess was something like a Duke but without lands, and that she was common herself before she took the seat.”

Numair pondered that while he watched Constant chatter to his new human friends. A passing musician offered Daine a rose and a wink, which she accepted distractedly without returning the flirt. Numair winked back for her, startling the man who blushed pink and scuttled away. Daine tossed the rose aside without further thought.

“I’m confused,” Numair announced. Daine looked like she was about to sass him, so he hurriedly continued, “Some of what you’ve said doesn’t line up with Savigny. You say chosen when they come into full understanding of their Gift, like his mother was I would assume if she was born common, but he seems to have inherited the title? Been raised into it, in fact. Is that allowed?”

Daine fidgeted. “Noooo,” she breathed, drawing it out. “Not really. It’s not really considered good manners to talk about it among the bags, but Lady Elspeth told us it used to be that there was all kinds of rules about who taught the new Gift and when they got picked. The old Gift wasn’t at all allowed to be involved, which is why Marquess Rose never trained Savigny and he was given to Cole instead. Lady Elspeth said picking him at birth was a perversion of intent. I don’t know what that means but she was real fired up about it. She called it …”

She trailed off. Numair focused on washing his fingers with water from his flask, letting her come to it herself. If she baulked now, he’d simply pay Elspeth a visit himself. She seemed inclined to chatter.

“She said Lord Dieudonné and Marquess Rose as good as sold Savigny like a specialty dagger,” Daine finished, her mouth firm. “As soon as they tested his Gift and figured it to be strong, they had him up at the castle signed over to the Queen faster than a kitten leaves its mama. She called it using duty as a wet nurse. I don’t know if it’s true.”

She was staring at her too-big boots, poking her toes up to distort the leather surface.

“They were always kind to me even though they were distant, busy nobles,” she added with a shade of discomfort colouring her tone. “It feels wrong to speak bad of them now they’re dead for something they did so long ago. They must have had good reason, even if it was wrong. And they loved Constant so much, I can’t see how they could have just … handed Sav away.”

Numair could. He was no stranger to the concept of nobles having children to serve necessary purposes such as marriages and distant titles before having children born to be coddled and kept close, unburdened by noble obligations. What did surprise him was how fond of his brother Savigny still was as, in Numair’s experience, the unfavoured child usually blamed the beloved sibling for their exile, not the parents.

They were interrupted by Constant appearing with his hands wrapped around something. “There are falcons here,” he announced. “I fed them! They’ve got chicks. And look at what I found in the horse trough by the tailor!”

He held out his discovery. It was a fat, warty toad who bulged unhappily at having been plucked from its moist abode. As Daine and Numair stared at it, it made a furious ‘buuuurk’ sound and flapped its weird feet in the air.

“I think you’re upsetting your friend,” Numair suggested to Constant, who lifted the toad to examine it and almost got tongued in the eye for his trouble. “Daine, can you talk to toads?”

“Shockingly, I’ve never tried,” said Daine with dire warning in her tone. “In case you hadn’t been paying attention, Sir Glitter, if I get too close to the things I try talk to, I turn _into_ them. I’ve never been fond of warts and flippers.”

Constant croaked back at the toad, who seemed shocked into silence as though whatever Constant had said in amphibian had been abominably rude. 

“Put the toad back,” Numair told Constant. “We’ll try a less warty animal, just in case. Where are the falcons you were feeding? Maybe they’ll be inclined to be our subjects since we filled their bellies with expensive meat.”

“I’ll ask,” said Constant, turning to peer up and around for his friends with the toad still in his hands.

“Or maybe the spices will have upset delicate tummies so much they’ll be in no shape to do so,” Daine argued. Numair couldn’t tell if this was a genuine argument or if she was baulking again. “You’ve got to think about what you’re giving things before – Constant!”

Her shout was mirrored by several passers-by, who shrieked and ducked as a falcon dipped into a dive intending to land upon Constant’s shoulder – and was promptly snatched from mid-air by the glittering, brilliant streak of bronze that was the Immortal hawk. Falcon and hawk crashed unceremoniously into the ground, the falcon – a sleek wild peregrine with a handsome beak and blue-grey feathers atop a barred white-tan chest – making the distinct alarm call of its kind, a panicked _kak kak kak kak_. 

“No!” screamed Daine and Constant as one, Constant thrusting the toad at Numair – who took it without thinking and then recoiled as he realised what he was holding – before sprinting to the scuffling birds. The Immortal hawk, seeing them, froze. It seemed puzzled by their anger, even more so when Constant, without fear of that deadly beak, grabbed it by wrapping his hands around its closed wings and lifting it so it couldn’t spread them. It did not like this. Tipped upside-down it kicked its silver talons in the air and screeched an unearthly sound, everyone in the vicinity clapping their hands to their ears except Daine. She was picking up the peregrine and retreating with it, running back to Numair with her hands bloodied and expression frantic.

Numair glanced at Constant. The Immortal hawk was certainly throwing an impressive tantrum but, despite its outrage, it wasn’t trying to bite or slash him. His hands were bleeding, cut by the creature’s feathers, and he seemed to have no idea whether he should put it down and run to Daine and the falcon or just keep standing there letting it cut him.

A woman appeared, holding a leather sack of the kind used to carry meat. “Constant, in here,” she instructed, holding the mouth of the sack open below Constant’s hands so he could shove the creature in, before pulling it closed via a thick cord. “Is it hurt, the other bird? Daine, look at me. Is your bird hurt?”

“Yes,” Daine confirmed, letting the stunned falcon huddle against her chest. Its eyes were partially covered by the white third eyelid, and it wasn’t fighting to get away from Daine who, as far as he’d seen, seemed to repel most animals. Daine seemed stunned herself, her colour paling as she stood there. He quickly tested her magic and kept a thread of his own against her, to warn him if her magic lashed out to heal the hawk or began to drag her into its mind.

The woman, who was tall and broad with a shock of shortly cropped white hair that stuck from her head and only accentuated both her height and warm brown skin, took this in stride. She took the thrashing sack from Constant’s hands, turned on her booted heel – Numair noted the long killing sabre sheathed at her hip – and called for them to follow her, fast.

They followed the woman out of the staring crowd and away from the square, past a cart with sacks of heavy flour half-unpacked and into one of the artisan bakeries. The customers and staff had piled out to stare at the screaming that had come from the square, now turning their stares onto the woman and her astounding companions. But the woman didn’t hesitate to push through the crowd and into the doorway.

“Weiryn’s Crown,” a woman inside who looked like the older, stooped version of their saviour exclaimed when she saw them. “Rainary, what is this? Daine? Is that you?”

Her vision was weak, Numair realised, seeing her half-clouded eyes. Her muscles, however, were still the strong muscles of an experienced baker, hardened by decades of kneading vast qualities of dough and carrying endless sacks of flour. Another young woman stood beside her, her own white hair braided into intricate coils down her back. It was only when this lady moved forward with a gasp to take Constant’s bleeding hands into her own that Numair realised she was as tall as the first stranger, though without the powerful build. Their facial structures, under their lived experiences, were identical. They were twins.

“Mistress Bette,” Daine greeted the elderly woman with a quick bow, still with her armful of bird. “We’ve an injured falcon. May we use your back room to tend to it?”

Numair realised he was still holding the toad, quickly ducking back out the door to release it into the street before returning. The toad looked relieved to have been freed from the madness, vanishing down the wet, cobbled alley beside the bakery. While Numair had been distracted by this, the others had been hustled out of the showroom, leaving Numair to awkwardly follow the sounds of chattering voices with one issuing firm orders.

He walked into the room where they’d gathered to find Constant sitting at a table as well-dressed apprentices scuttled around him with water and salves for his poor cut hands. Constant, however, seemed to be taking no notice of his injuries as he craned around them to try see what they were doing with his falcon, and the sack that the first lady was holding containing the Immortal hawk, who was still exercising its terrible lungs.

“Privacy, Maman,” Rainary requested. She handed the sack off to her sister, who looked with alarm at the tear appearing where a beak worked at the leather. That done, Rainary wrapped her arm around Daine and led her from the room, only stopping to flap her hand at Numair in an impatient ‘come come’ gesture. “Let us handle the falcon.”

Mistress Bette nodded; her attention wholly taken up by Constant.

“What am I to …?” the sister asked, holding up the sack. 

Numair sidled up to her with a charming smile. 

“Allow me,” he said, offering a gallant bow – there really wasn’t the room for it and several apprentices squawked at him – before taking the hawk-sack from her and casting a subtle spell of hold-fast over it. The hawk grumbled furiously as its efforts were stalled. The woman fluttered, thrown by his sudden, beguiling appearance, and he beamed at her before striding after Daine.

To his surprise, the sister followed.

“Alianora Gaétansra,” she introduced herself with an equally beguiling smile that, if the events hadn’t been so dire, would have charmed Numair right to his toes. He loved a lady with confidence, especially when that lady was barely an inch below him in height. A rare and delightful occurrence. “Nora for my friends though, of which you _must_ become, handsome as you are. You’ve met my sister, Rainary, I presume. Don’t bother flirting with her. She’s obtuse.”

“I am not obtuse,” came the calm response. Numair’s attention was tugged away from his wonderful companion and to the room they’d come to, Rainary sitting atop a bed which they’d covered with a towel and rested the injured peregrine upon. Daine was by the window, fiddling with the lock of the closed shutters. Both of them were raising their eyebrows at the newcomers. “I’m just sensible enough to have no interest in flirting with men. Daine, who is this startling foreign creature of yours?”

“He’s not mine,” Daine said, Numair feeling wounded by just how vehemently she said this. “If he’s anyone’s, he’s Savigny’s.”

“How unsurprising,” said Rainary dryly. 

“Numair Salmalín,” said Numair with a scowl in Daine’s direction he tempered with a smile at Rainary, who seemed unimpressed. “I’m Daine and Constant’s teacher. Daine, the falcon …”

“You want me to heal it, don’t you?” said Daine unhappily. She had the window open now, resting her hand on it – and she was the only one who didn’t jump when a second peregrine landed on the sill and cried out for its mate, the burlier shape of it indicating it was female to the injured falcon’s male. “Why can’t Constant? I’ll catch feathers.”

Numair was stunned she’d been so frank in front of the sisters.

“Did you hear that one asking to be let in?” he asked, indicating the female, who stayed where she was on the sill despite obviously wanting to fly to her mate.

Daine looked surprised. She stared at the female falcon.

“I … I must have,” she said, letting her hand fall from the sill and tucking it to her chest, expression uncertain. “I don’t know. My mind is full of shouting. There’s so _much_ , I can’t hardly think. Everything’s yammering.”

“Are you learning your magic?” Rainary asked Daine, resettling the injured falcon and getting bitten from her efforts. “Ow! Blasted creature. Daine, will you hold it? It’s going to shred me. What do you mean Constant can heal? Since when is he Gifted?”

Ah, Numair realised. The sisters were friends of Daine’s and familiar with the Hartholms, evidently. He was surprised. Daine hadn’t seemed the gregarious sort. He let Daine answer, unwilling to give too much information without knowing what boundaries were set here.

“Yes, I’m learning,” said Daine. “Numair says if I don’t learn to control it, it will control me.”

“Oh, that’s splendid, pet,” said Rainary, abandoning the panting falcon on the bed to swoop Daine into a firm hug that lingered. “I’ve been telling you for how long you need to get a handle on this. You’re not even going to know yourself by the end of it. You’ll be so free of all this madness nonsense.” She released the hug but kept her hands on Daine’s shoulders as she leaned back to peer at her face. “You’re home for good, then?”

“What an obvious question,” declared Nora. “Look at her, she’s clearly not on the street. Daine, this is wonderful. What of Constant? Did Savigny have him tested for the Gift? That was silly of him. He’ll have to pay even more to the Crown to register yet another mage to his household, what with paying the mage tax for you and himself already. That silly biscuit Donatien is going to be all kinds of put out by this. How fantastic. I like seeing his pretty nose out of place.”

“Constant has magic like mine,” said Daine. “Wild magic.”

The sisters were, each in their own way, horrified. Nora covered her mouth with one elegant hand, hiding a gasp. Rainary’s broad mouth tightened, lines showing around her deep brown eyes. 

“Not Constant,” breathed Nora. “Oh, I couldn’t bear him going mad.”

“He’s not going to be mad because we’re putting all that behind us if this teacher is here,” was Rainary’s sensible response. “Enough fretting. The bird, who’s to heal it?”

She looked, with expectation, at Daine. Daine looked at Numair.

“You could,” he offered, though he knew by her expression she didn’t believe him. Or, if she did believe him, it wasn’t enough to overcome her fear. Though there was the potential for her to feel pressured into attempting the healing, Numair knew, if she was that afraid then it would be a tremendous mistake to do so; unlike Constant, who dearly needed to be believed him enough that he could happily flaunt his newfound abilities, Daine if pushed would flee. He was certain of this.

“And if I drag him down with me?” she said of the falcon, Numair reminded of how she’d pulled him into her spiralling magic the first time they’d met. “Or become him and fly away, lost? What then?”

The sisters were watching, Nora wide-eyed and frightened, Rainary expressionless. Though Numair sensed her steady gaze was judging.

He said, “I’d never let that happen,” and was rewarded by the smallest smile Daine had ever given him.

It was enough.

Constant burst in, his hands bandaged and heavily scented with the acidic smell of healing salve. “Where is he?” he demanded. “Numair, let me heal him, please! All I can feel is his hurting.”

Numair eyed the bandages. They’d impair Constant’s contact with the falcon, but he suspected that that might not be an issue. Constant’s magic wasn’t at all hesitant about being used, unlike Savigny’s. And he wasn’t scared of losing control, unlike Daine. If Daine saw him healing without harm, perhaps it would bolster her confidence in the good her magic could do.

Numair looked at the sisters.

“You’ll get no tattling to the Sniffers from us,” said Rainary with a shrug, sliding into place beside Daine with her arm slung around the smaller woman’s shoulders in a familiar, comforting half-embrace. “I’m loyal to the king. Loyal enough to know this magical insanity isn’t his.”

“Don’t defend the brat,” said Nora with a sniff. “If it comes from his mouth who cares what hand is puppeting him. We’re not nobles tied to his waist, so why should we pretend to be? His insanity will get his throat slit one day by a radical and we’ll all be worse off when the country slips on his blood right into civil war.”

“Nora, go tell Maman to get the wards up so no sniffers get any ideas about knocking,” Rainary ordered her sister, who went and closed the door behind her. Once her sister was gone, she added an annoyed, “That’s enough of her idle treason.”

“You should go too, Rain,” said Daine to her friend. “You work at the palace. This will cost you your job, and your wages …”

But Rainary just hugged Daine close with a soft smile and kissed her forehead gently. Daine blushed at the affection but seemed pleased, decidedly not looking at Numair.

“Never mind me,” Rainary said. “Don wouldn’t dare let me go. I’m the only guard who doesn’t secretly hope an assassin slips past us one day, and he knows it. He made a terrible mistake letting Savigny walk out on him.”

“I don’t want Don assassinated,” said Constant, whose white-ringed eyes and paling lips suggested he was panicking at the idea of Don murdered. Numair was alarmed. He hadn’t realised Constant was prone to the Black God’s shock, attacks of fear associated heavily with victims of violence. It made sense, but it was an unhappy discovery; mages with the shock were in danger of losing control of their magic. It may have already happened; after all, something had caused Constant’s magic to lash out on the roof.

Rainary recovered smoothly. “Of course you don’t, my buck,” she said, abandoning Daine to steer the trembling boy to the bed. “None of us do, especially not those of us who like him. Which is why I’m there to keep his Highness’s delicate throat uncut and his ear at least slightly turned to someone sane. Now, stop thinking about it. Look at your falcon. You, Bumair or whatever – Savigny’s piece of pretty. Get over here and show Constant how to fix his falcon.”

“Bumair,” Numair muttered grumpily, doing as he was told. “It’s _Numair_.”

“I like Bumair better,” said Rainary with a smile as exuberant as her startling hair. 

Constant giggled weakly. His colour was returning to normal, his shaking evening out as he touched the falcon with gentle fingers.

“Okay, Constant,” said Numair, crouching beside the boy and resting his own hand overtop of his, the falcon alive below their entwined fingers. “I’m going to guide you in healing him. Daine, watch us, please. This will be you one day.”

Daine grimaced. Constant nodded, for once completely focused.

“I’m ready,” he said. “Show me what to do.”


	16. A Dog Named Bon Bon

“Don’t be sorry if it doesn’t work,” Numair warned Constant, drawing a ward around them using just his mind. All his focus was on Constant and the panting falcon. “Your wild magic is more familiar to my eye than Daine’s is, and I’ve never known wild magic to heal before.”

“You said I healed Pippy though,” said Constant.

“We _think_ you healed Pippy,” Numair corrected. “And you may have. But if you can’t, it doesn’t mean you’re not capable of wonderful things anyway, do you understand?”

Constant’s jaw was set in a way that reminded Numair delightfully of Daine. He suspected the boy had learned it from her. “I _will_ heal,” said Constant. “Do you need to put it in my head, like you did Savigny? I already know anatomy, especially of raptors.”

Numair was cautious. “Do you? Who taught you, beyond reading directly from your book? If you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, the falcon will pay a harsh price. Animals have specialised systems extremely suited to their purpose. A peregrine’s speed relies on its muscles. If you only have a rudimentary understanding and purposefully mend torn muscle without understanding why it moves how it moves, you’ll cripple the bird.”

“Like Savigny did your arm,” Daine muttered. Numair glanced at her, shaking his head slightly. It wasn’t untrue, but he didn’t like the fault he could hear in her voice. Daine wasn’t impressed by his denial though. “Don’t give me that look. It’s been a week and you’re still favouring it. It’s healed poorly.”

“I know it well enough not to do that to him,” Constant interrupted, not distracted from his falcon for anything, even Numair’s wellbeing. “The metal hawk cut him here, see. Look. That’s through the muscle that raises the wing and into the one that lowers it, right? They’re the largest muscles in a bird’s body.”

The injured falcon twisted its head around and nipped Constant’s finger very gently, almost rebuking them for taking so long, Numair fancied.

“There are also –” Numair began.

Constant gave him a strained look. “Skin muscles responsible for the feathers. Numair, I _know_. Trust me?”

He sounded so desperate. Numair wondered how often people really believed that Constant was capable. He remembered Daine, weeks before, implying that Constant wouldn’t understand what had happened to her if she were to slip away. Numair had defended him then; he stood by that now. This boy was capable of more than people believed of him.

“Very well,” said Numair, closing his eyes and laying a line of his Gift against Constant’s magic, so he could feel if something was going wrong and intervene. “I trust you. Close your eyes and breathe …”

The falcon was released to join his mate in the square once more, the Immortal hawk safely kept in the sack Numair had spelled to keep it there. They’d deal with it later. In the meantime, as Daine, Rainary, and Numair saw the falcon home – Numair proud enough to burst when he saw how well Constant had reconstructed the bird’s vital pectoral muscles and skin – Constant recovered by being stuffed full of rich pastries by Mistress Bette and Nora.

“So why didn’t you heal the falcon?” Rainary asked Daine as they returned to the bakery, stopping by the alley the toad had vanished down.

Daine looked uncomfortable. “We needed to know if Constant could,” she hedged, very carefully not looking at Numair. “Numair didn’t know for certain.”

Numair let her get away with it.

“It is interesting that he can,” he said, pondering it. “I’ve _read_ of wild magic being used for healing, but the last case was approximately one-hundred and thirty years ago. Incidentally, in Galla too. Maybe there’s a thread of it here and Constant is a throwback.”

“Good for Constant,” said Daine, looking glum. “You don’t seem to think that’s why _I_ can heal. Mine is still wrong.”

“Different,” Numair corrected. “Not wrong. Just different.”

Rainary, however, was narrowing her eyes at Daine. “Nonsense,” she declared, both of them looking at her. Numair, amused, and Daine wary. “That’s not why you didn’t heal the thing. You could have had Constant up at the guard mews and they’d be begging to let him heal their birds. Law or not, they’re in vicious need of a good hawk mage. You didn’t heal because you’re still scared of your magic, aren’t you? Even with this strange flimsy man to help you, no offence.”

“None taken,” said Numair, offended. Flimsy? Him? What about him was _flimsy_?

“Well, we’ll have none of that,” Rainary declared, looping her arm around Daine’s shoulders. Daine looked resigned. “Elphaba had kittens just three weeks shy. Let’s go see them and you can have a chat with her.”

Daine looked petrified, trying to turn to look pleadingly back at Numair as he followed the two women. Rainary was on a quest though and Daine was given very little choice, marched down the alley and into a side entrance. It led into an enclosed corridor between the bakery and the living quarters attached, Rainary leading them inside. As was common in cities where snow was predominant, the external room they entered was set apart for the purpose of shaking off muddy boots and snow-covered cloaks. It was kept warm by a small brazier, and there was a comfortable nest of bedding made up in the most sheltered corner. Within that nest, the suspicious green eyes of a grey cat stared out.

“Numair,” whispered Daine. Rainary had released her and gone to crouch by the nest, petting the mama cat. Numair could see small movements in the bedding as little blue eyes opened and peered about. “Numair, I don’t …”

He stepped up behind her, one gentle arm on her elbow that neither pulled her back nor pushed her forward. Softly, he said, “Come here,” and led her towards the door where he could speak to her in privacy – courtesy of a subtle muffling placed around them. “It’s time we talked, you and I.”

Daine ducked her head to hide her expression, though he caught her chin with his fingers and gently lifted her gaze. It may have been an error. Her steady blue-grey stare made him feel quite odd, and he let go quickly and tried to hide the shiver in his fingertips by scratching his own jaw.

“I figured it might be when Constant healed the falcon,” she admitted, sounding sorry. “Numair, I don’t _want_ to be lost again. You don’t know what it’s like. Ever since … ever since I left my village, it’s been like a battle in my head. There’s all these beasts wanting attention and leaving no space left for my own thoughts. And they _pull_ at me, which gets worse and worse if I pull back. You told me my boys would be sorry if I left them, so why do you keep pushing to make me flirt with going?”

“I told you I’d never cripple your magic,” he told her seriously. “I never meant I’d leave you without the tools to contain it. Daine, once I know what you can do and how far you can go safely, I can help make boundaries in your mind to keep out those voices, unless you want them, and to keep you from being pulled away from yourself – unless you want to be. I’m not going to let anything happen to you, but the next step is yours. No one ever conquered a fear by running away from it though.”

“But if I go mad again –” she said. He _loathed_ whoever had taught her this was madness.

“I see no madness in you,” he said firmly. “Do you think I’m lying?”

She studied him for a long time. The kittens were awake now, peeping at Rainary as she petted their mother. She was looking down into the nest with a fond smile, but Numair could see that her gaze was actually locked on Daine, watching her through her lowered lashes.

“No,” said Daine, eventually.

She seemed surprised.

“All I’m suggesting is you talk to them,” he said. “You’ve locked your beasts out for so long when you love them so much. I can quieten their voices, if you’ll let me. Make it so you can only hear the animals you’re touching. Would you like that?”

“Is it a binding?” she asked. “Like Savigny’s? I don’t want that.”

“No. I can do that too, later, when you’re ready for it and I have a better idea of your capabilities. But I won’t do it until you ask, and mine will never hurt you like Constant was hurt. This will simply muffle the noise and allow you to focus, until you learn your own control.”

They studied each other, the two of them. Numair didn’t have to get her to look him in the eyes anymore; she met his gaze quite calmly. In his chest, his heart was hammering so fast at the potential for a breakthrough that he felt dizzy with anticipation.”

Finally, Daine said, “Muffling will help, won’t it?”

“It will.”

She paused. Hesitant, but close to trust.

And she asked, “It wouldn’t help if I was mad, would it?”

“It wouldn’t. I couldn’t help you with madness. This? Daine, me and you, we can fix _this_. I promise.”

To his everlasting awe, she believed him.

They fetched up in front of the basket of kittens, with Numair behind Daine with one hand draped gently across the bare skin of her arm. There was a warding circle around them with the kittens, Daine and Numair, and Rainary on the inside. Daine’s eyes were closed, her breathing steady; she was much better at meditation when Constant wasn’t around.

As she worked to wrangle her magic into herself, pulling the stray threads of copper in that Numair was watching carefully, he was working to soften them within a cushion of his own Gift. Nothing that would bind or hold her – it wouldn’t stop her from losing control – but enough that he knew the world inside her head was quietening. As they worked, the tension was falling from her shoulders, her face smoothed into an unfamiliar relaxation.

“Now?” Numair murmured. His position put him so close behind her that his breath caught a lock of her hair. His cheeks warmed at the intimacy of that, but she was facing the basket with her back to him – and her eyes closed, anyway – so she didn’t see.

Rainary smirked; Numair ignored her.

“Now,” said Daine, her voice sleepy.

Rainary released the kittens. Numair couldn’t help smiling. He was fond of animals, and there was something incorrigibly pleasant about kittens at this fresh stage of life. They were awkward, stiff-legged creatures with sharp triangle tails that jutted up into the air like royal banners, their eyes still blue and their ears still with the soft, partially folded appearance of being new. Their little mewls were delightful, and they were determined – developmentally ready or not – to explore their world. One found a small knob of coal and began batting it, startling another, which fell over.

Daine giggled. The sound startled two more of the kittens, who tried to run and ended up tripping over themselves. Mama cat, with a sigh, left her cozy nest to come and clean them.

A white kitten, however, had not been frightened by Daine’s laugh. It stumped its way over to them on determined, wobbly legs, tail quivering. Daine looked down at it. Numair did too. It didn’t hesitate, just kept on marching its way to her boots and then, once there, sniffing industriously.

Daine shivered, leaning away from the kittens and against Numair’s chest. He didn’t move. She needed to know he was ready to be a support for her in overcoming this. Her eyes were open now, her magic still tame under Numair’s hand, and she looked back just once to Numair. Her eyes latched to his and searched for something there. She must have found it, because she nodded and then picked the kitten up with trembling hands.

“Hello, sweet thing,” she whispered, cradling it close to her chest. Surprisingly, the kitten didn’t shrill for its mama in the way of startled babies. It just sniffed her hands and then attempted to suck on the tip of her finger. “Oh, no. Silly baby, I haven’t any milk for you.”

Numair edged out from behind her, coming to where Rainary was crouched and easing his way down to sit on the floor beside her. Together, they watched Daine study her new friend, other kittens noticing the attention being paid to their sibling and trotting their way over for a turn. Mama went too, purring as she bumped her head against Daine’s leg. Daine was smiling, though it was hesitant.

Neither Rainary nor Numair spoke. Numair didn’t think he could, anyway. He felt overwhelmed by just how proud he was of his students today.

“You’ve always been a knack hand with telling the health of animals,” Rainary said idly, almost offhand. “Be a real treasure if you could make sure they’re all sound, especially now we’ve no animal mage around.”

Daine didn’t answer, but she nodded to show she’d heard.

They waited with infinite patience to see what would happen next.

Soon, Daine made her way over to Numair, sitting beside him and spilling her palmful of kitten into his lap. Numair petted the kitten as Daine got comfortable leaning against his shoulder. Her shyness around him faded, as it seemed to, when she was distracted by pecking at her brothers or studying something of interest.

“That’s a boy,” she said of the kitten now walking his sharp claws all over Numair’s thigh, purring enthusiastically. Numair was charmed by the purring, though less so by the claws. “I think, I mean, I feel … he’s healthy. Is this my magic?”

Numair nodded. “It’s not all battles,” he told her quietly. “Look at all the good you can do.”

Mama picked up a grey kitten just like her, climbing into Daine’s lap now Daine was seated again and depositing it there before going to fetch another. Daine touched the new one, checking its belly and its rear before turning it around and, ignoring its squeaky protests, its ears and mouth.

“A girl,” she said. “Oh, she’s lovely. Healthy all the way through. You must be very proud.”

Mama cat purred. Numair barely managed to stop from exclaiming; Rainary, as though sensing this, had grabbed his arm – hard. Not only was Daine talking to the cats, but he could see the tentative copper touch of her magic in the kittens, testing their health despite him never teaching her that. She was just _doing_ it. Again, he wondered what she and Constant saw through their magic. He wished he could see it too.

There were three kittens in Daine’s lap now, and room was quickly running out. Mama didn’t seem dissuaded. She simply brought the next one to Numair, probably viewing him as some kind of strange – flimsy, thought Numair with a sniff – extension of Daine. The kittens on him were not as well behaved as those on Daine. They climbed his shirt and tumbled around together, requiring all his attention to stop them falling. The shirt would never quite be the same as their claws unpicked delicate threads.

Suddenly, Daine stiffened. Numair kept his focus on his lapful of kittens. If she’d realised that she was talking to the cat without meaning to, there was nothing he could do to sway this moment one way or the other. Either she’d panic and withdraw, or she’d realise it was as natural as breathing and they’d have made the first momentous step.

“Numair?” she said, uncertain.

“I know,” he promised her. “You’re doing fantastic.”

Her smile was excellent. It told Numair that she was going to be just fine.

Despite Numair telling his students that they’d done more than he’d ever dreamed of doing on their first day of official lessons, Constant didn’t want to go home. Daine, when Numair asked her, seemed reluctant as well.

“I want to keep trying,” she said firmly. “It’s never been so quiet in my head before. I want to test it.”

Numair nodded, but he was thinking of the Immortal hawk. They couldn’t just haul it around Cría all day in a sack, as much as he also wanted to see if Daine particularly could keep making strides in her power.

“I can take your friend back to the Hartholms’ estate, if you need,” Rainary offered with a nonchalant shrug. “I need to return to the palace anyway and it’s on the way.”

“Sav’s there,” Daine warned her.

“Like I’m worried about that puppy showing me his little teeth,” was Rainary’s amused reply. “What state are the mews in? I’ll tuck it in there for you lot to deal with when you’re done with your spectacular animal adventure.”

“I don’t think it’s closed properly for years,” Constant said. “It’ll just get out.”

“Savigny’s favourite wine cellar then,” Rainary said with a wink at Daine, who smiled. “I’ll take it now. Eloise has new puppies if you need something non-threatening.”

“I think I’ll be okay,” said Daine.

“I was talking about this creature,” said Rainary, nudging Numair, who sighed. “Don’t startle him off with something frightening, like a horse.”

Muttering, Numair fetched her the Immortal hawk in its sack. It was sulking, Constant said, but otherwise unharmed. And off she went to release it, potentially, Numair feared, into Savigny’s bedroom. But that was a future problem.

“Puppies?” asked Constant hopefully.

Puppies, it was decided.

Eloise de Silvain was not the type of noble Numair had envisioned when he’d been told of her, the girl who’d also inherited her title at sixteen. That had been three years ago now, her parents and brothers murdered a bare nine months after the queen had been. She was now nineteen, but the contrast between the estate she lived in and the Hartholms’ was startling to say the least despite the similarities in their stories.

“Elspeth told me about you,” was the first thing Eloise said to Numair, putting her hands on her hips and studying him from the feet up like Numair had seen Stefan do to horses back home. He was surprised she didn’t ask to see his teeth, though she would have needed a ladder to do so. She was smaller than Constant. “You’re the nosy mage.”

“That’s not fair,” Constant said before Numair could. “Elspeth didn’t let him ask any questions, really. She just talked at him. And such _boring_ stuff. Can we see your puppies?”

Eloise grinned. It was a crooked, wild grin, missing two teeth at the side and with a scar in the shape of a starburst across her mouth only accentuating the asymmetric design of her face. Her hair was mousey and hitched into a no-nonsense bun; her skin was a sun-brown colour under a lashing of freckles that would have been startling on anyone else. On her though, the whole effect was to create a face that was so fiercely _human_ that Numair finally understood why some people inspired art just by existing. 

She’d caught him looking as she led them through the chaotic activity of her grounds.

“Horse kicked me in the face when I was eight,” she said, grinning at him to show how she could poke her tongue through the gaps in her teeth. “Mama said they’d never marry me off after that, which was just jolly for me. No one gave a whit how much time I spent with Pa and the hounds while my brothers were stuck inside learning sums and land laws. They just guessed I’d always be here so what was the point making me miserable about my lot as the ugly one? Smart for them. My hounds are the best in the land.”

“You’re certainly not ugly,” said Numair with complete honesty. He wasn’t flirting. It was a statement of fact, and he abhorred the practice of women disregarding their looks to make others feel better about themselves. If someone was lovely, they should know it, not be taught to cut themselves down.

Eloise shrugged, stopping to admire an apprentice gardener’s work on an intricate flowerbed. “I don’t care. I’m never going to marry if I can help it, though who knows with how life turned out. Now I suppose I’m the only one who can make heirs, so I don’t have a choice. Or, Goddess forbid, something happens to his Majesty and his sister. I’m his cursed cousin and that’s it for my hounds then.”

“Don keeps hounds,” Constant said, wincing as the topic of Don’s death came up yet again. “You could too if you ended up queen. Which you won’t. Rain protects him.”

“Kings are free to have their frivolities,” said Eloise with a sad smile for Constant. “Queens are women first. I’d have them declaring me unfit within a day if I started getting queer ideas about being unladylike. Look at the old Queen. She couldn’t smile without starting a dozen rumours.”

“It’s unlikely you’ll inherit,” said Daine quietly. She was looking ahead, to where Numair could see the sprawling bulk of the grandest kennels he’d ever looked upon. They looked nicer than the house or the glorious gardens they were walking through, which had hordes of staff working through it. He was fascinated. 

“That’s what they said about this place,” said Eloise with a sigh. “It only took one night for that to be proven wrong. Two parents and three brothers gone to ash and me only left alive because I was in Tortall with my aunt seeing a healing mage. But I made do. No time feeling sorry for myself. Numair, was it? Do you like the gardens? You seem delighted.”

“Very much so,” Numair assured her.

“I’m glad.” She beamed. “Mama loved these gardens. She used to hire the most interesting people to come and work them, people from all over the land. I don’t quite have her social reach, so after she died and people stopped coming by, I made them my own. I bring in apprentices from small guilds all over the city focused on gardens and forestry and give them free reign to practice their craft here before they take journeyman rank. Sometimes that leads to a rather eccentric outcome, but it’s always fascinating. I miss the mages though. Oh, the things _they_ could do.”

Constant looked bored to tears. Not one for gardens, Numair surmised. He hoped Hartholm fief had others to worry about the plant life.

“But, before Constant falls apart into a puddle of impatience,” said Eloise with another crooked grin, “let’s go. Daine, would you like to go inside? I can have the kitchen make you something wonderful while you wait.”

“No, thank you, lady,” said Daine politely. She was deferential without any of the ease she showed with Savigny or Constant. Numair was surprised. Constant talked about Eloise as though she’d always been close to the family and Eloise seemed familiar with Daine, but Daine had turned shy. “I’d like to come along.”

“Oh.” Eloise looked surprised but not overly interested. “Well, that’s lovely. Constant had me thinking you were frightened of hounds. I’ve been offering him pups for years that have taken to him, but he’s always declined saying you wouldn’t like it. Maybe now he’ll stop being so silly. A boy should always have a dog, especially if that boy is picked by the dog to be had.”

Daine just smiled and averted her eyes. Eloise gave her a bemused look and then shrugged, leading the way to the kennels.

“Do you know about Tavelés Hounds, Master Numair?” Eloise called back to him. Numair, side-eyeing the whisper-argument going on between Constant and Daine that he wasn’t privy to, tore his attention away and back onto the noble. Hurriedly, he strode ahead of the bickering set and walked beside Eloise, who was shockingly fast for a woman with such tiny legs.

“No, I haven’t,” he confessed. “My knowledge of dog breeds is slim, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, you’re in for a treat,” she said, brightening. “They’re the noble hounds of Galla, of course. Our national hound! Very, very special to us all, aren’t they, Constant?”

“Very,” Constant said, his voice wistful. “They’re _gorgeous_. Only two people in all of Galla breed them.”

“And I’m one,” said Eloise. “They used to be more popular, but hard times make hard people and the Tavelés are fancy hounds. They’re not hunters or coursers or at all suited to scent work. My aunt, Black God bless her, she was the Royal Houndmaster before me, the only one allowed to influence their lineage. Now that job falls to me and the last apprentice she trained before her death. It’s jolly hard work for two keeping a line pure to its intent without breeding it in too tight, let me tell you. But they’re our heritage, and they deserve to be brought back to their original glory.”

“Tavelés Hounds, that means …?” Numair queried. They’d reached the kennel and Eloise was opening the door to invite him in. He stepped inside, eyes adjusting to the slight gloom, before looking to the right and seeing –

“Commoners call them freckle hounds,” said Eloise proudly.

Constant laughed and shot under Numair’s arm to run to the pen, where five half-grown puppies hollered for his attention. They were leggy creatures with coats that promised moderate amounts of fluff when grown, though currently Numair could tell they’d be as fine as silk to touch. There were three pens in total with pups and mothers leaping up to yip excitedly at the sight of Eloise and Constant, as well as three more adult dogs loose who bounded over. Every single one of the hounds was absolutely, astoundingly _covered_ in spots. 

Eloise was grinning, walking to the closest pen and opening the gate. A flood of spots spilled out, Constant crouching to try hug every dog. As he did so, Eloise opened the other two pens. The resulting swarm of dogs knocked Constant flat; the last thing Numair saw was his delighted face laughing before puppies overwhelmed him.

“What a gruesome fate,” Numair quipped to Daine, nudging her. She was eyeing the dogs with a blank expression and they, in turn, were ignoring her. Eloise flopped into the straw-coated floor to introduce each of the puppies to Constant by name and history, stopping occasionally to point out something of interest to Numair.

There was a soft pressure against the back of Numair’s knee as he watched Constant roll about with his new best friends. Numair turned, looking down into the mismatched eyes of one of the freckle hounds. This one had lightly coloured spots of a soft warm brown, and a wavy coat of fur. One of its eyes was green; the other blue. Numair had never felt quite as judged as he had by its stare. 

Daine had turned too, making a soft noise of surprise at having been snuck up on. Constant and Eloise hadn’t noticed, so busy they were with chattering at each other about the puppies’ temperaments. 

“She says her name is Bon Bon,” said Daine after a brief moment of wary silence, the freckle hound turning that judgemental stare onto Daine instead. “She wants to know who we are and why we’ve let … oh, I’m sorry.” She laughed. “I didn’t realise he was yours.”

Numair knew she’d slipped into talking to the dog midway through translation, but he was bursting with curiosity. “Who is she asking about?” he asked.

Daine didn’t need to answer; Constant did.

“Bon Bon!” he yelled, launching out of the puppies as slowly as Numair had ever seen him launch himself – avoiding paws and tails – before hurling himself at the new hound. He wrapped his arms around her, bandaged hands held clear, and buried his face into her ruff. The new dog’s tail waved in an elegant wag, resting her muzzle on his shoulder and continuing to glare at Daine and Numair. From the dog’s ruff, his voice muffled, Constant informed them: “This is Bon Bon von Fancypaws. She’s _special._ ”

“That she is,” said Eloise. “The Tavelés hounds with the wood brown spots, they were the originals. Then somewhere some brat got it in his fancy mind that the black spotted ones were more noble and before long the browns were a rare sight to see, even rarer yet when ownership of Royal animals was restricted to those with families in the peerage. Bon Bon’s the first wood spot hound in, oh gosh. From what I can find, a jolly long time. There would have been more, of course, but they weren’t bred or kept so they weren’t recorded in the books. Probably they were discarded for being unwanted.”

Daine winced at ‘discarded’ but Eloise was blasé. Constant surely didn’t know what it meant as he didn’t react, and Numair doubted he’d have taken the knowledge well.

“We don’t do that here,” said Eloise firmly. “I’d love more wood spots. Besides, I breed other lines in to keep them healthy above being pure. Any pup that shows up without the spotted coat the nobles want for their dogs, I close the sex of and find a good home for lower down. Bon Bon’s never thrown a litter though, sadly, so I don’t think she’ll be passing that lovely coat on.”

Daine glanced once at Numair before kneeling beside Constant and Bon Bon.

“May I?” she asked the dog politely, who eyed her. She must have consented though, as Daine felt her around the hips and flank, brow furrowed. “Numair, I don’t know what I’m looking for. How do I know if something is wrong?”

Numair glanced at the other dogs, who were all watching curiously, as was Eloise.

“Ask one of the other females to come to you and see if anything feels strange about Bon Bon compared to them,” he suggested. 

Eloise’s eyebrows raised, but one of the dogs detached itself from the puppy horde and ambled over on slender legs. Some of the puppies tried to follow, but another dog scolded them back. Daine examined this one too after asking it, then returned to Bon Bon.

“She’s never seemed unhealthy,” said Eloise after an awkward silence broken only by one of the female dogs growling at a curious male. She stood, chasing the two males who had come in to watch out of the kennel and closing the door to keep them out. “Constant never told me you had animal magic. Is that what this is? My aunt used to have a hound witch. She was fantastic.”

“It’s not something I talk about much,” said Constant.

“Very sensible,” Eloise reassured him. “I’m sorry the animal mages got caught up in his Majesty’s laws, though. We’ve lost more puppies to poor matches since then than ever before.”

Daine interrupted. “She says she’s never had a season,” she said to Eloise, who poked her tongue through her teeth again thoughtfully. “She’s not interested in being mated at all. What could cause that?”

“I haven’t the experience to know, I’m afraid,” Eloise admitted. “My aunt would have. She was a Tirel.” This last bit she said to Numair as though he should know what it meant, baffling him until he remembered: Elspeth had named one of the murdered families as the Tirels.

He swallowed around that information. To lose one family to murderers was a tragedy. To have another taken so soon after … he couldn’t imagine. And now here she was, a woman alone running a household at nineteen. Was Silvain linked to a fief? It didn’t seem possible she could bear so much weight alone; look at Savigny. He was older and barely managing.

Eloise added, this time to Constant, “You know, if she can’t be bred, she’s always been special to you. Would you …?”

Constant looked longing, but he shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he apologised to the dog, hugging her again as she snuffed into his shirt. “But Sav would _never_ let me.”

“Would you mind if Daine took a look at your other dogs?” Numair asked Eloise. “I’d like to see how many she can work with at once before it gets too overwhelming.”

“Of course not,” said Eloise. “If she can tell what they need or want, she’s worth her weight in gold.”

Daine, gone shy again, blushed so deeply she had to do a Constant and hide her face in Bon Bon.

“Hear that?” Numair teased her. “I might be glitter, but you’re _gold_.”

He ignored what she called him. It was hardly ladylike.

By the time they returned home, it was late. Eloise had fed them a delicious dinner, so all that was left was for Numair to tell them how fantastic they’d been, for Numair and Constant to find where Rainary had put the Immortal hawk – in the wine cellar, as promised – and for them all to bathe and crawl into bed. They were exhausted. Numair was the happiest he’d been for weeks. If they kept progressing at this rate, he’d be home before Solstice for sure, politics aside.

Before Numair went to bed, he passed Savigny’s bedroom, knocking gently before letting himself in. It was odd to see a closed door in the house and he felt strange closing it again once he was in. The room was only barely lit, the fire burned low. Savigny was awake but sleepy, sprawled languidly in his bed with the blankets tangled around him and only one eye open, watching Numair.

“You’ve moved your rock basket,” Numair pointed out, seeing it by the wall. “I had to remember how to open a door, I’ve gotten so out of practice. You know, I’ve never asked what those are about.”

Savigny had gone to smile sleepily at Numair’s quip, though the smile faded into weariness as Numair kept talking. “Constant’s fancies,” he said, closing his eyes. “It makes him feel safe to have doors open.”

“He does know locks exist, surely –” Numair began. But his amusement faded sharply as his tired brain realised why a boy might not like a closed door. “Ah. Your parents.”

“He was too short to undo the lock,” was all Savigny said. “Enough of that. How fares your teaching, O’ Master Salmalín?”

“They did splendid,” Numair told him, looking around for a seat and resigning himself to sitting at the foot of the bed when he realised there wasn’t one. “Daine chattered to an army of puppies without flinching and Constant healed a peregrine.”

“Amazing,” Savigny mumbled, rolling onto his back and yawning before stretching below the blankets. “Don’t make me get up if you’re here to teach me something. I’m lazy today.”

“You’re hungover,” Numair teased, sliding up the bed to pass the man a glass of water from the pitcher.

“Ridiculous. I don’t get hungover. I’m weary from taxes. You smell like hounds.”

Numair, with a sly grin, said, “Constant wants a dog.”

“Constant,” Savigny said with ill-humour oozing from every word, “wants a _menagerie._ Imagine the expenses for that?”

Numair laughed.

“How am I supposed to teach you if you won’t get out of bed?” he asked, shaking his head. “Tragic, the youth of today. No enthusiasm.”

Savigny rolled back over, facing Numair with his arm hooked around his pillow, face half buried in it. “I’m enthusiastic,” he mumbled into the pillow, closing his eyes again and settling in. “Just lie beside me and lecture. I’ll listen, promise.”

Numair pulled a face at him that went to waste since Savigny’s eyes were closed and he seemed determined to go back to sleep.

“Is that you flirting?” he asked instead of scolding, deciding to take the invitation as it was and lying down beside Savigny, his entire body sore from a day of physical activity after so long being ill. Savigny didn’t open his eyes, but he did wiggle over to make room, so Numair assumed he was content with him being there. “Asking me to lecture you in bed, I mean. I must say, when you said I’d know if you were flirting, I didn’t expect it to be so obscure.” 

“Either be quiet or go away,” was Savigny’s drowsy response.

Numair, never able to let someone else have the last word, said, “I’m taller than you. I could just _make_ you get up and learn, if I pleased.”

Savigny was faster than Numair had ever imagined. He’d never seen the man in action, and he certainly hadn’t expected him to go from sedate to dangerous while lazy from his late, rummy night. But, without warning, Numair found himself up and out of the bed, unsure of just what exactly had caused him to go flying through the air until he hit the rug and Savigny, effortlessly, pinned him. 

Numair blinked at the rug his face was pressed into. Savigny’s weight held him down, the man’s grip on his wrists unbreakable, his mouth breathing hot air onto the back of Numair’s neck. The contact was electric. Numair was suddenly vividly alive.

“My hair,” Numair complained into the weave, feeling that the tie had fallen out in the tussle, his hair slipping loose. “You’re messing it _up_.”

“I’m faster than you, mage,” said Savigny with dire amusement, releasing his grip just enough the Numair – with great difficulty – could turn his head to side-eye him. “I’m stronger. And you have no idea how to break my hold without magic. Just _how_ do you intend to make me?”

Numair considered what a sensible response would be, and then promptly discarded it.

“You’re out of bed, aren’t you?” he said, smirking. “So I would say I’ve _won_. Wouldn’t you?”

Savigny sat up. This allowed Numair to turn over, finding Savigny kneeling over him with his weight on his knees, looking put out. He was not, Numair realised now as he looked him up and down, very clothed at all.

Numair, pushing his luck, slid partially out from under Savigny until his chest was free, and then sat up. This put him almost face to face with the other man, which was an excellent position to be smug in.

“I’m a _winner_ ,” Numair added, self-righteously.

Savigny stared. Numair’s smile faded. He sensed he was in trouble. They were both breathing fast. He opened his mouth to say something.

The kiss was hardly unexpected, Savigny hauling Numair forward by a deathly grip on the front of his tunic to bring them ferociously together, but it was dismaying that it stopped Numair from talking further. This, Numair thought briefly before deciding not to think at all, was probably the point. And there were worse things to be interrupted by.

“Finally,” he breathed as they broke apart for air, letting himself be pulled down onto the dusty rug by the insistent hands of the other man.


	17. By Firelight

Savigny was Numair’s favourite type of lover. He was luxuriously lazy in the process of undressing Numair, which made Numair feel as decadent as an imported dessert. They’d broken apart from each other on the dusty rug of Savigny’s floor, Numair’s tunic already half undone and the cord on his breeches loose. 

“You work fast,” Numair said, breathless and vivid. “Is this you flirting?”

Savigny replied, “I’m very hands on,” before standing and pulling Numair up with him in one easy motion, using the slim disparity in their heights to bring his mouth to Numair’s throat. Numair’s reaction to that was instinctual; he arched into the warm strength of the other man’s body, wild with the whisper-traces of Savigny’s lips across his skin. One hand came up to curl greedy fingers through Savigny’s soft curls, the other coming to rest finely against the outline of his cheek. Savigny held him in place through the thrust of this movement, hands on Numair’s hips holding him steady and pulling them tight.

They worked each other in silence, Numair responding to Savigny’s hands on him and Savigny working to get Numair unclothed as quickly as possible without losing any of the presentation. With every item of scattered clothing, he’d stop and survey what was revealed, Numair wishing he could return the favour but flummoxed by the low light from the fire which only served to backlight Savigny and obscure the superb details of his body. 

“Not fair,” Numair kissed against Savigny’s throat, having to slightly stoop to do so but considering it worth it as Savigny made a pleased noise. It was the noise that reminded Numair of practicalities: he quickly paused to draw a muffling spell around the room, keeping them safe from prying ears, and adding a small twist to lock the door. Then he returned to the task at hand: “How come you get to admire me and I’m left quite literally in the dark?”

Savigny groaned. “I’m too weary to light the fire,” he complained, nevertheless pulling himself out of Numair’s avaricious embrace and making to move to the great hearth. 

Numair said, softly, “You have magic now, Savigny.”

He said the name like a promise, filled with darkling intent. Savigny turned back to meet his gaze, his answering smile just as intending.

Behind him, the flames leapt up, searing, pink-hued, violent. The room was drenched in light, in heat. Savigny looked as cocky as a cat at having done this small magic, briefly glancing down at his hands as though it still shocked him that he could do so. Numair drank in the sight allotted to him, whispering, “Glory,” as he did. He was a man who loved pretty, pleasurable things. This night, this man, they promised to be both.

Numair stepped forward, bidding Savigny to stand still while he traced curious hands over him, learning his shape in expectation of being examined on his knowledge later. He found that Savigny had a lithe body, surprisingly muscled considering Numair had half-regulated him to the ‘pampered nobility’ part of his brain. His muscles weren’t the solid, dangerous ones of practiced knights and guards that Numair knew came from bearing arms, and nor were they much like Numair’s own, which came from hard travel and a need to be physically able without a decided purpose. The vast majority of Savigny’s were in his legs, his posture lighter on his feet than Numair was used to, his stance odd. For the first time, as Savigny stepped back with his fingers curled around Numair’s, leading him to the bed, Numair saw that he walked with a dancer’s practiced grace. 

He wore nothing but thick, woollen socks, which Numair now looked down to and smirked at even as his gaze was drawn back up to the view offered by Savigny turning his back.

“Are you done?” Savigny asked, tone dry.

“Absolutely not,” said Numair. “I’m an academic, and you are _captivating._ Do the socks stay?”

Savigny laughed, a glorious, unfamiliar, startling sound. 

“The socks stay,” he said, sprawling back onto the bed with just as much control over his body as he’d had walking. Numair’s suspicion was increased; he’d travelled with many entertaining troupes on his way from Carthak to Tortall and bedded plenty of dancers. If Savigny wasn’t trained in dance, he’d eat his own hat. Once he’d purchased a hat to eat, of course. 

He tumbled into the covers with Savigny, briefly engaging the man in a delightful tussle to establish their placement in the bed. It ended, unsurprisingly, with Numair tangled in the sheets and quite helpless to stop Savigny from pinning him down and beginning his own exploration. Unlike Numair, however, Savigny used his mouth. 

“Your scars?” Numair queried breathlessly, trying to yank his arm out from the sheet it had become wrapped up in to reach up and touch the puckered mark left behind by an arrow through Savigny’s shoulder. He remembered the illusion again with a surge of sadness at seeing that injury brought to life, Savigny pausing to ruffle his hair with his loose hand and then look down at what Numair had become distracted by. He looked messy and pleased. His eyes were shadowed, heavy-lidded. He was slow to respond.

“Arrow,” he said finally, touching the scar himself with a grimace and following Numair’s hand as it traced the faded ripples caused by a burn on his arm. “Mage fire. Why do they matter?”

“I like knowing,” said Numair. He touched, now, a long line across Savigny’s hip. It was a terrible scar; he couldn’t imagine how dreadful the wound had been, slashed right across the man’s front in a blow that Numair could all too easily imagine belly-cutting an unluckier person. 

Savigny shook his head; that one, the head shake meant, remains a secret.

“What about this?” mocked Savigny gently, sliding down Numair’s body to kiss the outer line of Numair’s now-naked thigh, his pants lost to the returning shadows as the fire burned down. He was paying attention to the whorl of clumsy ink that was tattooed there, one that Numair felt a wrench of pain deep in his chest when he looked down at. For a moment, the head bowed there was Varice’s, the delicate hand holding the needle and ink-pen hers too, and the crackling of the fire was Ozorne drunkenly laughing as he waited his turn – “What is it? It looks like some obscure musical horn.”

“A crocodile, I think,” said Numair. His voice cracked. He felt terribly, horribly tired. “At least, that’s what the artist promised me.”

Savigny looked up at him. In the dying light of the fire, Numair realised something; the strange colour of the man’s pale eyes, even more surprising considering his warm, dark skin, was familiar. They were a ghostly green, the colour of cat’s eye actinolite, a rare stone that Numair had worked with in university a lifetime ago. They reminded him, shockingly, of Nonny’s wolf green eyes, except Savigny’s were more … alive. Despite their oddness, they were human. They were, right now, darkened by the low light and the high desire and the press of fatigue. Numair cast aside any suspicion that Savigny was, somehow, Nonny. He’d looked in the strange mage’s eyes and seen nothing; he looked in Savigny’s right now and saw life.

Savigny dropped his gaze without further question, keeping his index finger on the blurred outer line of the faded tattoo as he ghosted his lips along Numair’s thigh, a trail of phantom touches that walked their way along his hip, lingered over the bumps denoting the pelvic bone, dipped down along the line of his stomach, and ceased there with warm air blowing softly just below Numair’s abdomen. Numair was frantic. His fingers gripped at the sheets. He was exhausted. He closed his eyes and twisted his hips up, Savigny settling his weight across him to press him back down. Numair could have happily slept for years under that comforting pressure. Instead, he whispered a moan and sunk into the bed, head tipped back, sunk in pleasure, deliriously aroused. 

“I’m entirely unsurprised you treat sex like you’re proving a point,” Numair teased. His voice was covetous. Hoarse and uncontrolled, much like how he felt in his entirety right now. 

“Is this sex?” Savigny murmured. He arched his own spine, sliding up Numair until they were hitched together. Numair’s hands came up and wrapped around him; they rolled on the bed until Numair was above the other man, delighting in the glorious contrast of their skin where his hands splayed on the other man’s chest. Savigny gasped as Numair touched him: “I thought we were just playing.”

Numair laughed. His hands stroked, explored, caressed. Savigny’s eyes were almost shut, his expression sated, his body magnificent. And when Numair tired of holding himself up and rolled onto the bed, instead of being disappointed, Savigny rolled with him until they were side-by-side. Savigny’s nose resting against Numair’s collarbone, Numair with one arm draped tenderly over his side. Though their hips were tucked together and they could, and did, find pleasure in the other, this pleasure tapered into languid laziness, into Savigny breathing quietly against Numair’s skin, into Numair feeling slumber settling thick and decisive over them both. 

“We’re falling asleep,” he complained, nevertheless tucking his mouth down against Savigny’s hair and inhaling the human scent of it. He adored this: touch, companionship. It had been so long. “Would you like me to use my mouth? I assure you, if you think I’m quick-tongued in polite conversation, that’s nothing compared to what I can do when provoked.”

Savigny twitched with subtle interest, expression briefly tempted.

“I’ll remember that,” he said drowsily, body turning lax. “I’m content as we are. I crave touch, not completion. Is that enough for you?”

“More than enough,” admitted Numair honestly. “I sleep best in the company of others.”

“Mmm,” was the hummed reply. 

They didn’t speak again. 

The last thing Numair was aware of was thinking, the fire’s gone out.

Numair woke. He was, momentarily, aware. The bed was warm and soft. The body sleeping beside him was these things too, Numair lifting his head to enjoy the sight. Then he nuzzled down with his body tucked behind Savigny’s, mouth leaned against his shoulder. He planned to return to sleep like this. It was too early to arouse.

The fire blazed, for a moment flaring white and then – as Numair stared at it – flashing a deep golden yellow in a split-second sear of colour. It vanished as though it had never been, leaving the room scented with smoke and honey. Numair was baffled. It seemed likely it was a message, or a warning, but Numair didn’t know from who and, more importantly, he didn’t know if it was something he was supposed to have seen. If it wasn’t, it was a far better idea that Savigny believe he hadn’t.

Numair, smelling the honey, made sure his body was still lax, his breathing even. He closed his eyes and muttered something incomprehensible into Savigny’s skin even as the other man startled awake and lifted his head. There was a brief moment of confusion that followed waking without warning. Then:

“Numair?”

Savigny’s voice was soft. Numair didn’t answer, just nudged the other man’s shoulder blade with his nose as though only faintly aware. He was rewarded with a soft laugh, muffled as though by a hand.

“Sorry, gorgeous,” whispered Savigny, sliding out of Numair’s loose grip and leaving him cold. He returned as a pair of lips that kissed the corner of Numair’s mouth and added a gentle, “You better not put pants on before I return. I owe you a tumble.”

Then he vanished. Numair listened to the sounds of hurried dressing, only opening one eye when the movement shifted away. A crack of dawn was leaking into the room as Savigny pulled a curtain aside and peered out, grimacing. The light was dim and damp. It was freezing. He was dressed in the embroidered vest Numair had so long ago commented on and, as he turned from the window, Numair saw that his hands were busy buckling on a sword belt. The man stopped by a cupboard and opened it to obtain a sheathed sword that hung cleanly from the belt. Knives were added, a cowled cloak overtop. It was evident this was not something Numair was permitted to be privy to. The whole process took less than a minute. Savigny slipped from the room.

The door clicked shut behind him. 

Numair counted half a minute and then leapt up and went to the window, veiling it with his Gift before peering out through the frosted glass. He ended up having to shove the window open to see, unable to heat it to shed the frost without cracking the glass. This was icy. His body did not thank him and, muttering, he wrapped the curtain around his hips to try protect his delicates.

It was foggy outside, but he saw Savigny striding across the still-warped courtyard that Numair hadn’t put to rights yet. He’d be out of sight in a moment. 

Numair hesitated. The memory of his last use of the hawk shape haunted him. But needs must, and with Galla how it was, Savigny vanishing into the night left Numair queasy with unease. He decided to trust in his recovery.

He pulled the shape on fast, which wasn’t comfortable or nice. Though he dropped almost instantaneously into the shape of the black hawk he’d painstakingly crafted from his Gift, it left him with the uncomfortable feeling of still being the shape of a man. Clumsy, he wobbled his way to the window and tried to remember that he had wings now instead of arms. Flying without establishing that would be an error.

It clicked.

With a powerful sweep of his wings, Numair leapt – first – onto the windowsill, feeling his talons bite at the soft wood, and then he pitched out and into the sky. It took more effort than he’d expected to glide across the courtyard. The air was heavy and the fog left his wings leaden with moisture. No warm updrafts were there to give him height and his muscles, which he was reliant on in the absence of updrafts, were wasted from inactivity. He had to land faster than he’d intended, clinging in an ungainly fashion to the steeple of a tower attached to the estate’s walls. He could see Savigny vanishing into the stables of a building on the hidden streets behind the grand estates, where the servants were housed if they didn’t stay within their workplaces in the quarters allotted. Numair sidled around the steeple, narrowing his vision on the stable until Savigny emerged, leading a spotted horse that frisked to be drawn from its warm bed. Numair muttered in his scratchy bird voice at the foolishness of horses. Then he leapt from the steeple and glided to one overseeing the street that Savigny was leading the horse onto, the fog thickening as he landed. Briefly, he saw Savigny pause and adjust the horse’s tack with one hand as he drew his cowl over his head – and then the fog swirled thick and Numair lost him.

Cussing, Numair risked flying low to find the man. This time he alighted on the fringed gutter of a home, peering down at the cobbled street. He could hear hooves as though from miles away, clattering in no particular pattern. A horse prancing in place, he imagined. 

A horse burst from the fog. Numair almost fell from his perch at the sudden explosion of noise as it snorted, overexcited. The rider was Savigny, recognisable from the fine cowl and a flash of his sword. But the horse – Numair blinked. The horse was brown? A tired, dull nag, not the fine spotted fancy-creature that Numair had seen Savigny leading from the stables.

They were gone. The sound of hooves receded fast. Numair discarded a brief idea of following them; there was no flying in this fog, and he’d become lost for sure.

Curious beyond belief, he returned to the window which he’d flown from, taking back his human shape and, gleefully, tumbling back into the warm bed which still smelled of the both of them. There was nothing more to be learned until after his nap.

The sounds of fighting roused him. Numair jerked up with none of the gentle stirring of his prior awakening, staring up at the ceiling as his brain registered shouts drifting in through the window he’d neglected to pull shut the night before. He heard Constant hollering and leapt out of bed, dressing fast in the first thing he saw – a thick robe that was the warmest singular item of clothing he’d ever held in his own two hands – and raced downstairs. 

He burst from the back entrance with a spell on his tongue that died as he saw what was occurring. The fog of this morning had dissipated into a warm spring afternoon, and Savigny had returned. 

“Hit me like I deserve it!” goaded Savigny with a laugh that was mocking, light on his feet as he leapt out of reach of Daine, who was wielding a thin wooden sword in one hand and a dagger in the other that even Numair could tell was blunted. 

“You _do_ deserve it,” snapped Daine, lashing at him. Savigny whirled out of reach, untouchable. This infuriated Daine, who hurled herself at him, trying to batter him with the wooden sword like it was a club. Numair gaped. He’d never quite seen a practice sword used so … ferociously. “Stay still, curse you!”

“Make me,” mocked Savigny. He darted close, evading the sword and tapping her rudely on the head with his own dagger before darting out of reach as her sword missed him by a hair. “You have no form, no stance, no plan. Know where your feet are going to go before your muscles do! Otherwise you broadcast it.”

“It’s not so easy,” Daine grumbled. Numair leaned against the door. They must have been at this for some time now before they’d gotten loud. She was dripping with sweat, her hair escaping its ties. Savigny appeared fresh. 

“Of course it is,” said Savigny with a cocky smirk that fully explained why Daine wished so devoutly to batter him with her stick. “I always know where my feet are going to land. Understand the world and your place in it.”

“I’m gonna understand you with this sticker in a minute,” Daine snarled, whirling at him. “Constant!”

Constant leapt down from where he’d been observing from a low stone wall, his own practice sword in hand. As Daine forced Savigny to retreat from her wooden blade, Constant came up from behind him. The two attacked Savigny, Daine with no technique but rage and Constant hesitant but smooth. 

Neither even came close to striking him. Numair couldn’t tell if Savigny was a master in swordplay as Alanna was, but it wasn’t his technique that was assisting him now anyway. Just sheer speed. Neither of the two facing him had a chance. It might be lucky that they didn’t, Numair considered, wincing as Daine’s sword whizzed past Savigny’s arm with crushing force. Daine had the arm muscles of an archer. If any of those strikes landed flat on an extended bone, Savigny was going to end up borrowing Numair’s old splint.

“Play time is over,” said Savigny, his grip changing. His smile had vanished. “Defend or die.”

The other two hesitated, Constant taking a step back.

Savigny attacked. If Numair had hoped to see them rally themselves in the face of this proclamation, he was sorely disappointed. Constant was disarmed in a heartbeat, narrowly avoiding getting whapped across the rear with the flat of Savigny’s practice sword only by turning and bolting out of reach. Daine wasn’t as clever. Savigny whirled on her, letting loose with a dizzying series of thrusts that had her stumbling back too fast to keep her feet. She tripped backwards, Savigny’s sword lashing hers out of her hand and sending it clattering to the ground. Barely retaining her feet, she ducked out from his follow-up blow – and his foot tripped her.

Numair softened the ground quickly, Daine bouncing instead of landing hard. Savigny glanced at him, his expression lazy. Incorrectly, Numair assumed it was over.

Daine knew better.

She used his momentary distraction to launch her feet into his stomach with punishing force, Savigny bucking with the sharp exhale that implied he’d just lost all his air. Numair winced. It was a mean blow. 

The next one was meaner. Her foot swept up and Constant yelled a warning, meaning Savigny was able to block her from getting him in the unmentionables, Numair mortified as he recalled with unhappy precision the damage a blow there could do to a man. Daine didn’t seem dismayed that Savigny had blocked her kick, altering the blow and battering his ankle with her blunt dagger. He pulled his foot out her reach, and she attacked. Hurling herself bodily into his stomach, they both went down with twin yells, where she got a grip on his tunic and yanked it up and over his head. Savigny, in response, tossed her bodily into the air, his weapons long gone and reduced to wrestling with her in the dirt as Constant made himself sick laughing at them. Numair, however, was appalled. They were being so violent! As he watched in abject horror, Daine managed to grapple herself to Savigny’s back and went for his hair, pushing him down into the dust.

Savigny hollered.

“Yield!” he shrieked, trying to protect his hair. Constant was on his knees now, wheezing and clutching his stomach. “I yield! No, no, stop!”

“No mercy,” was Daine’s cold response. She had a handful of dirt. Savigny’s hair seemed doomed. 

At the last minute, she tossed the dirt aside and – as Savigny turned his head to watch it scatter – she used a grimy finger to draw a squiggle of muck across his cheek. Savigny huffed at her, grinning nonetheless, and she rolled off of him to lie on the ground, both of them panting.

Then she popped up and stared at Numair.

“Why are you in Savigny’s robe?” she asked. There was a beat of loaded silence. Then her curious expression turned into one of amusement. “Oh, how lovely. Now you can knock the silly out of him instead of us. I hope you buy him some pretties, Numair, keep him soft-eyed and gooey. And a charm to stop any unwanted babies.”

“Who’s having babies?” asked Constant, who hadn’t been paying attention.

“You’re a child,” said Savigny snootily. He got up with a wince, rubbing his stomach where there was a dusty imprint of a boot on his creased vest. “I cannot bear the idiocy. Do the exercises I set you, please. You’ve clearly not practiced a whit since I last tested you, and an opponent will not be as kind.”

“Yes, not many cut-throats abandon their quarry for fear of their pretty hair getting mussed,” teased Daine without an inch of sorry in her tone. “Vanity is a terrible flaw.”

“Vanity won’t get my throat slashed if I don’t practice it,” was Savigny’s dire warning as he collected the wooden weapons. He left without another word, probably to wash his face.

Numair looked back at Daine and found that she was still grinning at him. He decided to cut her off before she got sassy.

“Though I’m sure you’ve had fun whacking about with sticks,” he said, “you’ll have even more fun with mediation practice.”

Her face fell. Constant looked even glummer.

“Why doesn’t Sav have to practice mediation with us?” complained Constant as they followed Numair inside, going to wash up while he retrieved his clothes.

Daine muttered something extremely unflattering that Numair was certain he wasn’t supposed to hear judging from the glance she gave him when he whipped his head around to stare at her. 

“You have the ears of a bat,” she said, scowling.

“And you have the mouth of a sailor,” he retorted. “I’ll thank you to not make comments about my bedroom when there are much more important things to be putting your mind to, like learning how to stop your magic from spilling everywhere every time you try to use it.”

“What about your bedroom?” asked Constant. “Is this about the babies from before? Alvory says Don –”

“Constant, someone _has_ talked to you about baby making, haven’t they?” Numair asked, extremely alarmed by the boy’s confusion. He was too old to not have been taught. “How old are you?”

“Fifteen in twenty-four days,” Constant answered speedily. “And yeah, of course. Loads of people. It seemed for a while that’s _all_ anyone wanted to talk about. Even Savigny told me what to do to stop girls from having babies if I lie with them, unless I’d rather lie with boys in which case he says all bets are off.”

“Thorough,” said Numair with a twitch of his mouth. “I don’t believe my education covered the risk of pregnancy in men lying with men. Are lovers of the same sex common here? My experience is some nations are more … accepting … than others.” 

Constant shrugged, disinterested. “I guess? Love making is boring, boys or girls.”

“There aren’t nearly enough hawks involved,” said Daine slyly, Constant frowning at her. She turned her attention to Numair: “Common enough there used to be Mother Goddess temples devoted to those who were attacked for loving differently. That was a while ago though. I think those temples were the first to be pushed out in favour of other gods.”

“Worse gods,” said Constant. “But Adel knows all about temples, if you want to ask him. He’s wrote _books_. We can go ask him now instead of meditation!”

It was a nice try, but Numair raised his eyebrows at him. Constant sighed.

“Fine,” he huffed. “All _I_ wanted to know was who was having babies. Alvory said Don –”

“Don’s not having babies,” Daine cut in. “He only lies with men.”

“I _know_ ,” Constant tried again.

Numair, not paying attention, paused in the doorway. He was definitely surprised by that. “Don the king?” he asked, earning a nod from Daine. “And that’s accepted by the nobles? What about heirs?”

“That’s what I’m trying to say –” Constant said.

Daine, also not listening, said, “It’s no secret. Everyone knew about Sav and Don courting growing up, and it was always assumed Savigny would be King’s Consort, and that Solange would give an heir since she can’t inher –”

Constant, fed up, screamed: “Don’s getting married!”

There was silence. Daine blinked. Numair leaned against a doorway, rubbing an ear.

And there was a soft, short inhale of breath from the hall. 

As one, they looked. Savigny, freshly washed stood there. He was looking at Constant. He wasn’t speaking.

Daine spoke first, and her voice was softer than Numair had ever heard from her when directed at Savigny. All she said was, “Sav …”

Savigny, very quietly, said, “It’s fine,” and left without another word.


	18. The Ruined Face of Galla’s Finest

Though he hadn’t done anything wrong, Constant felt like he was in trouble in the horrible hour that passed after his reckless proclamation. He wished he’d thought it through before opening his mouth. It had obviously been a silly thing to shout. He’d just been so frustrated by them all talking over and around him, like he was a child or not even there. 

Like it had been before Numair had arrived.

“Maybe I should go talk to Sav,” Constant said to Daine. They were supposed to be meditating. Numair had left them with a circle and instructions to stay before he’d gone to dress himself. Devoid of supervision, Constant was working on his sketches of Pippy in his beloved drawing book and Daine was on her belly, chin propped in her hands, having a stare-off with Pippy herself. Neither seemed sure of the other.

“Let him cool his head first,” Daine suggested without breaking eye-contact with the sea eagle. Constant wondered if they were talking, a sharp sting of lonely envy stabbing at the thought. Even Pippy, _his_ eagle and friend, talked to Daine instead of him. It didn’t feel at that moment like it mattered that Pippy couldn’t talk to him; it was a betrayal anyway. He slouched. “You know how mean his mouth gets when he’s heartsore.”

“I don’t get mean when my heart hurts,” Constant said, the closest he’d ever felt to mutiny. He was thinking of Daine and Pippy talking, and he was thinking of Numair in Savigny’s robe, and he was thinking of being taller but not quite tall enough that people had stopped talking over him. “Maybe I should tell him that I think it _horrid_ that he takes his soreness out on us when it’s not our fault Don’s stopped courting him.”

“Oh, don’t be like that.” Daine’s voice was soft, but still a rebuke. “What’s got you in a knot? You’ve been steaming since Numair sat us here.”

“Nothing,” lied Constant.

Daine kept on: “You know it’s different when it’s love troubles. They take up a lot of space in some people, and Sav’s one of them. All heart and no sense. He’s always been that way, not sensible like you and me.”

Constant didn’t see why that made a difference. How were Sav and Don’s heart troubles any different from Constant’s heart troubles when Daine was missing, or when he saw Sav sad for their dead parents, or when he felt lonely and lost? All those things hurt his heart. They were big too; they mattered too.

He mattered too.

“I’m going to talk to Sav,” he declared, standing. Pippy and Daine were both narrowing their eyes at each other now. They didn’t look at him. Constant turned his back on them, disgusted, stepping over and out of the circle. Only at the door did he pause. “Was it like this for you?” he asked over his shoulder, Daine finally looking at him with her expression confused. He continued: “When you and Rain stopped courting, I mean. Did you let those troubles crowd out everyone else in your life?”

Daine stared at him. 

“Numair’s right,” she said, startling Constant. “You do know more than we give you credit for, don’t you, buck?”

Constant shrugged, unsure.

“You didn’t answer,” he said.

She replied, “No, Constant. No, I didn’t. But Sav and Don, they’re different. My world would be too empty without everyone I love in it. Them, they’ve always been content being just two.”

Constant hated her for saying it; he hated that it was true. It was the worst part of wanting Don back and for everything to return to how it had been before. Don took up too much space. When Sav loved him, he had less to spare for Constant. 

Without another word, Constant slunk from the room and went looking for his brother.

It took longer than expected to find Savigny, who wasn’t in his study or his bedroom or in the yard. Constant was about to check the wine cellar – remembering with a jolt his Immortal hawk – but he heard a tremendous clattering coming from the room that had, once, been used for grand parties. It was between the west wing, where they lived, and the east wing, where they didn’t. They never went there which was why Constant hadn’t thought to check it. Even now, as Constant tiptoed up the dusty hallway, he felt uncomfortable. A stranger in his own home.

The clattering continued.

Constant oozed his way to the ballroom in a viscous fashion, every nerve jangling. He hated, hated, hated this side of the house. The dust was thicker. The ceilings felt lower. The walls were narrower. The doors were all shut and Constant felt afraid of looking at them, like his morbid curiosity would cause them to pop open and spill their innards out to messily coat the dull marble floors. He felt surrounded by the ghosts that Daine felt infested her old bedroom. It wasn’t hard to imagine them. Paintings and statues that had once lined these halls were now covered in thin sheets, protecting them from dust. They lined the hall like ghastly servers impatient to thrust their miasmatic meals upon him.

By the time he reached the slightly open door to the ballroom where the clattering was coming from, Constant was damp with sweat. His body felt like it was rusting over. He creaked to the doorway and peered in.

The ballroom was supposed to be the heart of the estate. It was designed to let in the most light possible, to offer the northern windows a superb view of the palace which was set against the mountain bare streets behind them. The ceiling had been, Adel had once told Constant, built as an architectural marvel, the pride of Galla, designed to swing open with a system of ropes and pulleys to reveal the skies above. Dancers below would be warmed by huge braziers set about the polished floor. If the palace where Don lived was externally foreboding, a final reminder that Galla had teeth, the Hartholms – a family who had been closely entwined with the Gallan monarchy long before Rose had become Marquess – had been designed as Galla’s gloriously painted face.

Now, that face was ruined. The paint had smeared off. The eyes were shattered. Damp had eaten its way through the skull, leaving gaping holes in the flesh, the walls. The floor was awash with dirt and plants stubbornly hanging on to life where the humans had given up. The ceiling, so cleverly made, hung in. The bannister on one of the sweeping staircases leading up to the palace viewpoint was crumpled outward, gaping like the slash of a sword.

Constant stared at that broken bannister and his knees buckled, almost tipping him through the door. He barely held himself up. It was so quiet. The wards against animals had never felt so stark. This abandoned cavern, it should have been reclaimed by beasts, at least. But nothing lived here.

With difficulty, he tore his stare from the stairs and over to where his brother was castigating the speckled world, thin trails of stubborn sunlight pushing their way through dirty stained glass to illuminate the dirt stirred up by Sav’s feet. He had a staff Constant didn’t recognise and he was lashing at a statue with it, so ferocious that bits of the statue were pinging off. The sound was strange: the outraged clatter of hardened wood against a carved surface, Sav’s hoarse breathing, his feet dull on the sodden floor.

“That’s probably priceless, you know,” came Numair’s voice, the decaying room taking the familiar from it and turning it hollow. He appeared from where he must have been skirting the stairs, studying the bannister. “Surely there are cheaper options to take your temper out on?”

“I’m not angry,” Sav panted, using both hands to thrash the statue with pained grunts every time wood connected with stone. Constant winced at every solid _crack_. He could see the blows jarring Sav’s whole body from his arms outward.

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” said Numair, approaching Sav at an angle. He was watching Constant’s brother carefully, one hand almost outstretched. Dressed now, Constant noticed, in some of Sav’s finer clothes. 

Sav’s staff clipped the arm of the statue, something shattering loose. From here, all Constant saw was Sav leap back and slap at his arm with a snarl before raising his hand and, for a heartbeat, staring at the statue. Constant couldn’t see his expression. Pink fire, lit from within, began to flicker around Sav’s outstretched hand. Dull before it boiled outwards, restrained but furious. The glow of it lit the room so strangely. 

Numair said nothing, just stepped into striking range of the static Sav and closed his hand around where Sav held the staff, one-handed. 

“Will it make you feel better to blow up your busty friend?” he asked. His voice was mild but it carried. It felt safe. In this room that Constant felt should have been left in the past, Numair was a vivid reminder that this was now, not then. 

“I –” rasped Sav. He came to a truncated halt. There was silence, taut and hurting. Then: “I don’t _know._ ”

Constant released the doorframe he’d been clinging to so tight he had splinters in his fingertips from the swollen wood. He clapped his hands to his mouth to stop from making a noise. Sav sounded like a hare in a trap, aware the noose would tighten if he struggled but scared enough of this inevitability that he might struggle anyway _._

“Then how about we don’t do that,” said Numair, stepping closer. He had taken the staff, Sav dropping his hand as the fire snapped out of existence and he sagged inward on himself. The staff clattered aside as Numair tossed it, stepping into Sav’s space to wrap his arms tenderly around him as the man let himself crumple into the embrace. 

Constant stared, splinters prickling his mouth from his fingers.

“You must think I’m a fool,” Sav said into Numair’s shoulder, lifting his head to look Numair in the eye as he spoke. His voice was miserable. 

Numair kissed him.

Constant stepped back, uncertain. Unhappy. Sceptical. It wasn’t a kiss like Don and Sav had used to kiss when they’d thought no one was looking, clinging and avaricious. It was quick, soft, comforting. Somehow, that made it worse that Constant had seen it. It was private.

“No,” said Numair. “Never. I don’t believe it’s wrong to feel pain passionately. No matter who he is now, once he was a part of your life. It hurts to realise that’s changed.”

“Married,” groaned Sav, burying his face back against Numair’s shoulder with his fingers biting hard at the silk shirt. “What woman would be cracked enough? And a child!”

His voice shuddered to a stop.

Already, Constant could see in the way Sav clutched at Numair, at the shape of his clinging, Sav was once again reallotting the love he had spare. Taking back what Don didn’t need anymore and giving it to another, leaving less for Daine and even less again for Constant, who didn’t demand it but longed silently instead. In the way Numair looked at Sav, focused and gentle, tender and fascinated, was the end of Numair’s interest in Constant too. It wasn’t jealousy that twisted hard into Constant’s soul right then; it was a return to loneliness, more damning for that it was expected. Nothing stayed good.

Numair, whispering endearments, pretties, and soft sounds into Sav’s hair, said one that resonated. It chilled even Constant, who knew it was terrible even if Numair didn’t.

Numair said, ignorant, “I’m here, darling.”

Sav stilled. Even from where he was hunched, Constant saw his eyes widen, his skin washing out under its dark colouring. Gone jagged and stiff, he tore himself loose from Numair and staggered back as though run through, looking at Numair like he wasn’t seeing him at all. 

Constant braved the decay for his brother. He leapt out of hiding, halfway across the abandoned floor before the two older men realised he was there.

“Sav,” he exclaimed, before stopping. He didn’t know what to say now. He’d come out here because he’d known how much hearing Don’s casual endearment dropped so easily from someone else’s lips would have stabbed. He’d been driven by his certainty of isolation, but now he was here he didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t figure what words he needed to say to fix what he’d broken, to pull all the pieces of their lives back together.

He didn’t know how to put the paint back up and drive away the rot. They’d let it in, invited it even. Now it was swallowing them.

Sav seemed to take Constant’s silence as a personal affront. The glassiness to his stare was vanishing, annoyance replacing the hurt.

“Go away,” he said. Voice husky, hoarse. He didn’t want Constant seeing him like this. That was understandable. Constant didn’t want to see it either, but he’d rather see it than let Sav wallow in it alone. Numair didn’t know. “Go back to Daine. Aren’t you practicing your lessons? You disrespect Numair by ignoring his instructions.”

“It’s fine, you’re not in trouble, Constant,” said Numair in his usual vaguely hesitant, always kind voice. “Is something the matter?”

But Sav wouldn’t be deterred.

“Out,” he commanded, taking a warning step towards Constant. “This side of the house isn’t safe. The structure is weak.”

Numair winced, looking guilty.

“You’re upset,” Constant said. The bannister had caught his eye again and he couldn’t help but look at it even though he knew it would make Sav look too. They, the both of them, glanced at the floor below it – Constant breathing fast and Sav with his mouth pulled thin.

“I am _not_ ,” was Savigny’s lie. “I’m annoyed because my tedious brother is ignoring direct instructions from those he should heed. Constant, look at _me_. Not there.”

Constant looked at him. He was shaking again.

“Why are you here?” Constant asked, his voice cracking pathetically. “If it’s so dangerous, I mean. All you’re doing is ruining it more. Can we go? I want to go.”

His chest was tightening again. He flexed his fingers, curling them into his palm so the splinters stung, replacing the tingling. Numair was giving him the strangest look.

“You can,” said Sav, turning his back. Constant gulped air. He looked at the bannister. It smelled of rot. Something creaked overhead. “I’m busy.”

“I want to go,” said Constant again. There wasn’t clean air in here. It was all bruised. If he wanted to breathe again, he had to leave. But he couldn’t leave Sav. 

But he had to.

“Then go,” said Sav. “I don’t want you here –”

Constant couldn’t hear him.

He gulped but there was no air, just more bruising.

“Constant,” said Numair suddenly, his voice reaching Constant through some long and empty tunnel. Sluggish, Constant looked at him. Numair was walking towards him, his face indistinct through blurry eyes. “What can you see? Name five things. Focus on that, not on anything else.”

Constant stared at him, bemused. He couldn’t fathom what that had to do with anything.

“Leave him,” snapped Sav, Constant managing, somehow, to look at him through the slowness that had infected his brain and cut off feeling to every part of his body except his wildly beating heart. “He’s pestering for attention like a child.”

“I’m not a child,” Constant managed to say, running his tongue over his teeth. He didn’t know what was going on with his arms, his legs, his head. Sav snorted. Anger sparked, hot against the infection of ice. Again, Constant demanded – as though saying it again would make his brother realise how true it was – “I’m _not_ a child.”

Numair was saying something, his voice low and intent, but Constant could only focus on one thing now and he chose to focus on Savigny. His brother stood there, brilliant and hateful in his hurting, his heartsore mouth ready to be mean.

Constant got in first.

“You treat me like a child and I’m not,” said Constant, finding the words from where he’d secreted them deep inside him, buckled down where they wouldn’t cut anyone unless, like now, he shook them loose. “You _are_ upset but you won’t let me help you because in your eyes I’m a boy and cracked to boot. You’re doing it right now. I’m not mad!”

His voice shrilled, snapping at the end. 

Sav was looking at him like he was acting obscenely. “This tantrum isn’t helping your case,” he said in a voice so mild Constant wanted to snatch it out the air and crush it.

“It’s not a _tantrum_ , I’m –” Constant had to stop and close his eyes, a wash of dizzy leaving him speechless. When he opened them, Sav had come closer.

“What’s wrong with him?” Sav demanded of Numair as though Constant wasn’t there. 

“He’s fine,” said Numair, doing the same. “Let’s go get something to drink –”

“I’m not _cracked,_ ” Constant snapped. This whole conversation was knives. Nothing was safe to touch. Everything could cut. They were looking at each other; he was invisible.

“– battle shock –” Numair was saying.

Sav, belligerent, arguing, “Don’t be ridiculous. He’s being a brat.” 

Sure only of his invisibility, Constant dug deep into the secret words and pulled loose the sharpest he had stored there. They tripped from his tongue without his bidding, heavy with their fatal determination to be heard.

“This,” he said without stammering, “is why Cole says there’s something wrong inside you.”

There was silence. Nothing broke it. Constant glanced, a final time, at the bannister as he said it – as guilty as though their mother was standing there, aghast at how rude he was being to his esteemed and _chosen_ sibling. 

Constant tore his gaze away from the ghost of their mother, looking at Sav instead. A stranger stared back, gruesomely wearing the face of his brother. Sav was angry. Constant hadn’t ever seen him so terrible.

The retort came slow, but it did come.

It was, as Constant deserved, devastating. 

“If you’re so fond of Cole, perhaps he can keep you,” snapped Sav, “because the Gods know I’m sick of you being tied to my hip. Or did you think I loved spending six years raising you?”

Numair made a disapproving noise.

Constant swallowed any other words he had back down. He stepped back once from the bruises his brother had inflicted, and then once more as he registered the reach of that savage tongue. He waited, fleetingly, for a take-back. For Sav to say, “Wait, no.” For Sav to say anything.

Sav said nothing.

“I’m sorry,” Constant hurled backwards, fleeing from the airless obscurity of that dreadful room. He ran so fast he missed the turn he was supposed to take, running faster when he realised someone was calling his name – until he looked up through the dazed horror of those words said by that person and realised that he was in the east wing, their parents’ wing. He was surrounded by more closed doors. More airless rooms. More ghosts. 

He yelped and tried to run back, but everything here looked the same, sunk as it was in atavistic misery. He dodged a broken piece of furniture and ran for the light, hoping a broken window would provide an easy escape. In the back of his mind, there was a clamouring: Pippy. Maybe another. Metal clashing furiously. His Immortal, sensing Constant’s distress and rallying against the walls that held him. Constant focused on that feeling and turned towards it, jogging back with his breath spare and his lips prickling. He turned a corner, and another, and another, each turn slamming him back into those words – he was holding Savigny here; Savigny was decaying in this house because he, Constant, requiring raising; Savigny resented this deeply and so resented Constant too – blindly following the sense of his hawk –

Until he turned another.

There it was.

Here he was.

This room had no door. It hadn’t had a door in six years. What had used to be a door crunched below Constant’s boots, shattered, disregarded. It had failed its purpose. It hadn’t kept anything out, nor in. What stood ahead now was a black, waiting void. 

With morbid curiosity, Constant wondered if he could see the shape of their murder if he tiptoed up and looked in on the sleeping darkness. He’d never seen it after The Incident. Only before, when he’d beg to share his parents’ bed. He knew though, how it had happened. They’d been surprised there by one group of assassins; in that room, their father had died reluctantly. Their mother hurled to a grim end in the ballroom as she’d tried to chase her murderers away from her children. Which meant, if Constant were to walk back and look down, as he did …

Constant stood before the door of the room he’d slept in as a child, kept close to his parents. He slung his hands in his pockets because he didn’t know what to do with them, and he tried to control his breathing because he knew he was going to drive himself to the floor if he didn’t. He studied that door, which was, of course, closed. Unlike the others, which were made of a rich dark wood stained even darker by time, his nursery had been painted a fickle white. He didn’t open the door. It would be horrible to do so. He just stared at the faded discoloration on the painted wood where someone had bled against the door as they’d held it closed against those who’d sought to enter. He barely remembered; he knew Savigny would never forget.

Yet, they lived in this house and, as he’d discovered today, Savigny ventured into this side of it.

Constant wondered if that was his fault too.

Walking, not running, Constant turned and strode away from that door. Calmer now despite the horror, he found his way back to ground level, wiggling open a window and dropping into the savage light of the afternoon. The east wing loomed overhead, sagging and contemptuous; he only realised once he was out that he had no intention of going back in.

“Master Constant?” came a voice from behind him, Constant jittering around to find Ruben eyeing him. Sav’s voice was still ringing in his brain. “Are you well?”

Constant decided.

“Where’s Thibault?” he asked. 

“I can fetch your horse for you,” said Ruben with a low bow. “Was there somewhere in particular you were riding? Guards may be needed.”

“They won’t be necessary,” said Constant. “I’m not going far.”


	19. Ill Blows the Wind

Captain of the First, Rainary Gaétansra, knew an ill wind was blowing through the slitted walls of Château de Cría. That wind, today, had brought along with it a king who wouldn’t emerge from his bedchambers, a Household Cavalry who mutinied against her, and the tepid discourse of one Viscount Pech de Darragon. 

Pech, as trying as a boil and, Rain suspected, equally as pleasing to lance, had attached himself to her in the manner of unwanted bodily protrusions. Striding stoically through the vaulted halls of the palace going about its daily rituals, Rain ignored him and Pech ignored her doing so. He was a whittled down splinter of a man, composed entirely of overwide blue eyes, thin blonde hair he tied back into a horse tail and fretted at constantly, and nauseatingly expensive clothes splattered with enough paint to incorrectly suggest they were well-worn. He followed tenaciously, nattering like a witch about his denial of entry to the king’s chambers with the same high-energy manic twitchiness of Don at his worst. Unlike the king, Rain knew, Pech’s agitation came not from burdens of the mind but instead burdens of the nose.

Right on cue, Pech paused in his yammering, unsnapped the pocket vial he carried everywhere, and sniffed at the contents. She didn’t know what it was filled with but could guess. Stimulants were a common vice among the dispossessed gentry, too young to inherit and too old to be kept quietly at home prettying up their country estates. Pech had taken that boredom and become an artist while he waited for his uncle to either disinherit him entirely or die before he could, since he refused to be a husband worthy of his estranged wife. The worst of it, Rain admitted, was that Pech was a superb painter. She hated to give him the credit.

“Captain Raincloud,” Pech said after replacing the vial and discretely wiping his nose with an embroidered whisper of silk. She glowered at him. “Rainy, honey, you must let me in. I’ve set aside a whole day for this, and Beltane is so soon. Is the Prince not to have his portrait for Beltane?”

“The King,” said Rain stormily. Across the hall, one of her young guards, standing to attention at the halls leading to the keep, caught her eye. He was struggling not to laugh and she suspected her expression was a story. Pech did bring out the worst in her.

“The King, the Prince, the babe beloved, what does it matter?” Pech said with an eloquent roll of his eyes. Rain felt envious of a nearby suit of decorative armour. It held a pike. A pike could be used to poke boils with or, if that failed and the boil proved obstinate, she could fall upon it herself. “Little Donatien, such a picture. Imagine how sad he’ll be without his Beltane portrait! And I, devoid of the chance to paint His Majesty’s glorious curls.”

“I don’t think His Majesty cares for portraits,” said Rain honestly and with deadpan disinterest.

Pech gave her a watery stare. “Why do you hate me so?” he moaned, disconsolate. 

Rain started walking again, this time towards the grand front entrance through which a delightful walkway would lead them right to waving goodbye to dear Pech and back to the business of finding out why her authority was being usurped. Pech, charmingly unintelligent, followed without suspicion. He had a wing in the castle of his own, though he only used it to paint. Rain had no idea where he slept; she had no desire to know.

“I’ve never met a viscount I’ve liked,” she said dourly. There was no danger in being rude to Pech. He didn’t understand cruelty. He was a rabbit raised by hungry foxes with time to burn.

Pech, on cue, chuckled. “Gorgeous Savigny was a viscount before he climbed the ranks of the esteemed, was he not? A Marquess’s son with no inheritance. His brother gained the lordship. How irksome that must have been for him. Surely you liked Savigny?”

“Spoken like someone who has never met Savigny,” said Rain, sweeping the man out of the front doors – her guards bowed to him and quite cleverly hid their grins, for which she was thankful – and across the pebbled sweep of ground before the entranceway which a prior king had installed to stop a mounted attack. A horse on these stones would break their knees, if they were lucky. She supposed they were beautiful too, but it wasn’t her job to admire beauty.

“Steady on,” said Pech, pausing in his simpering to frown across the grounds. “Behold, Uncle’s favourite.”

Rain, bemused, turned to look where he was gazing. It was a frustration to be halted in her quest to remove Pech from the premises without offending his family, though she doubted Lord de Darragon would blame her. There was a quarrel of guards at the gate, the odious shape of Magisra Cole’s right hand, Magisri Ossika, guiding them. A scene very familiar as it had been one that had faced Rain herself a mere hour before when she’d demanded entrance to the king her heart’s blood was sworn to protect only to be told he was seeing no one. Turned away, toothless and enraged, and set to cosseting the overgrown gosse, Pech. This time, however, it was a child lord upon a dandy horse who was being set upon by Cole’s mongrels.

Riotous, Rain abandoned Pech and marched over there, resplendent in her Crown white-and-blacks and not to be denied so long as she wore the King’s Rose over her heart.

“The king is unwell,” Ossika, the bitch, was saying to Constant de Hartholm, who seemed in dire distress. “I’m afraid all who are not required to serve are to be turned away, child.”

Constant opened his mouth to speak. Probably, Rain knew as she’d known Constant as a swaddled babe and a toddling enfant and as the lost fil-child he’d frozen at since that terrible night, he was going to apologise for causing them trouble. He was too much like Daine; both of them insisted on apologising for taking up the space that they deserved to exist in.

She cut in.

“That _child_ is Lord Constant de Hartholm of Hartholm fief,” she roared, guards snapping to attention at the sound of her voice with shared, guilty glances. “Son of his Esteemed Lord Dieudonné de Hartholm and her revered Marquess Rose, Gift to Queen Mathilde, may the Black God treasure her. _Brother_ to our own King’s Gift, Marquis Savigny de Hartholm, and in his own right beloved by His Majesty King Donatien. You, Ossika, are a tedious worm who disrespects the grass your boots are crushing. Apologise to your lord and bow.”

“Rain,” whispered Constant, his cheeks giving up the barest hint of his deep blush. He was mortified by her conduct on his behalf; she wasn’t at all sorry. Not here, in this palace, in her position. She would hold the guards to standard, even if the quality of their current force was decidedly variable.

Pech, who must have followed her, coughed out a soft, _Technically, a viscount until sixteen, non?_ that she absolutely refused to heed. Instead, she kept her direst stare on the enraged Ossika, who gave a bow that was barely respectful. Constant’s horse, unnerved by the hemming of guards, mouthed at its bit, blatantly considering bolting. Rain knew Constant was too good a rider to allow the horse to do so, but the horse was big for him and the mount-killer road lay before them.

“Stand aside from your betters and return to the posts I set you,” Rain told her guards icily, noting the faces of those that obeyed and those that hesitated and looked to the blue and silver uniforms of the two officers of the Household Cavalry who stood with them. Worse, some looked to Ossika herself. “None of you have the authority to deny a lord entry.”

The guards, aside from the officers, scattered. Those two men also left, though not until Ossika nodded at them to do so. Rain narrowed her eyes. Cole was absent from Galla for the season, but she disliked how his tumorous presence lingered. 

Ossika snapped a contemptuous bow to Rain and Constant and turned on her heel to stalk away.

“Ossika,” said Rain quietly, only managing to stop herself from adding anything onto the end. Ossika, haughty and upright with her hooked nose and grey eyes and black-grey hair, somehow both exactly the twenty and five years she was but also well into her middle years at the same time so duplicitous her face, eyed her. “Dine with me tonight. I’d love to discuss why my guards march to your barks all of a sudden.”

“Magisra Cole is advisor to the king,” said Ossika in her breathy voice, pithy as a peel and just as unpleasant to consume. “I stand for him in his absence. My Lord. Captain. I’ll take my leave.”

They were left standing with Constant atop his dappled horse.

“I didn’t realise the king’s dog going away made her queen bitch,” said Pech into the uncomfortable silence of Rain waiting for Constant to explain and Constant failing to do so. “What an unpleasant person, don’t you agree, Raindrop?”

Rain looked at him, surprised that he spoke so candidly of Cole, who was as well-liked as Ossika wasn’t. Constant sniffed a damp giggle, his eyes fever bright.

“Hi, Pech,” he said, rubbing his mouth with a hand that was bloody. 

“Hello, charming Constant,” said Pech. He did what Rain hadn’t yet and stepped forward to offer his hand to help Constant down from his horse, though he declined to take the rein that Constant held. A shadow fell quickly over them. Rain looked up and saw something circling overhead, wondering what creature the boy had brought with him this time. Pech was still talking, Constant’s panic idling down as he attended to the odd man. “What’s this about a demand to see our king? Why now, I was hoping for just the same thing. A lord cannot be denied, of course, so Captain Rainary and I would love to escort you. Isn’t that right, Captain?”

Constant turned frantic eyes onto Rain. Blast Pech, but he was right. Ossika couldn’t stop them taking a peered lord to attend to the king, not without the king himself denying them. And sending Pech away now would be twice as difficult.

Suffer the boil to spare the boy, she guessed with a sigh.

Whistling for a stable hand to come for the horse, she led Constant – and Pech – back towards the palace. Answers to her questions, like why the boy lord was in such a volatile state and what had possessed Ossika to flex her thin authority, would come with time.

Rain was a fierce, frightening force. Constant didn’t feel up to matching her energy right now. All his focus was on holding himself together, desperate for a lifeline and glad that Pech was there to dull Rain’s intensity. Adel’s nephew was a capricious man who reminded Constant very much of who Savigny might have been had life been soft enough to let him grow happily into himself, someone who pleasured in making pretty. Constant, having made this connection at some point, liked him very much for this. It had been Pech who’d taught Constant to paint the animals that Adel introduced him to in his incredible study.

They let Rain march ahead, always so much stiffer when she was on duty. Pech chattered about his experiments with something he called ‘imp ore’ to create a new hue of paint. As soon as Rain pulled away to speak with the guards who blocked the passage into the palace wing Constant recognised as Don’s, so near it was to the mews that he could smell bird mess through a nearby open window, Pech idled closer to Constant.

“You’re a fright,” murmured Pech without looking down. He was playing at examining his snuff vial, wiping powder from the cap and rubbing it from his finger onto his gum. “Is there trouble at home? Uncle and Aunt are well, aren’t they?”

There was a catch of worry in his voice. Constant guessed he was thinking of the murders, and hurried to say, “They’re fine, wonderful, even. Adel says there are seers seeing portents in the lower city and he’s writing pages on it.”

“Captivating, truly,” said Pech. “So what ails the boy, then? To put it kindly, you reek of fear sweat. That shirt is quite ruined.”

Constant closed his eyes, fighting an oily nausea that coating his throat and the back of his tongue as he thought of Savigny’s burden. He couldn’t speak it, not to Pech. It was too terrible. There was only one person he could seek comfort from. Numair was Savigny’s lover, and Daine was still so flighty. If Constant startled her, she’d flee back into the Bog. No, it had to be Don. He’d know what to do.

“Taxes,” Constant lied weakly. “We’re getting audited again.”

It seemed to work. Pech seemed appalled. 

“How ghastly,” he sniffed, returning the conversation, thankfully, back to imp ore.

The guards were stepping aside. Constant hurried beside Rain. Pech followed with a wave at the guards as they let them pass into the suites. They entered the guest parlour, which was empty, and Rain led them unerringly through into Don’s rooms. They weren’t unfamiliar to Constant, who’d spent time with Savigny, Daine, and Don here. The comfortable surroundings restored his confidence. He darted ahead, knocking impatiently at the door leading to Don’s bedroom and pushing it open without waiting for a response.

“Don,” he exclaimed, hurtling into the darkened quarters and blinking with surprise to realise how close it was in there. Don was visible only as a formless shape below his rich covers, the shutters pulled and the low fire belching smoke into the room.

“Majesty!” exclaimed Rain, her voice taut as a rope. She looked shocked. Evidently, she hadn’t known Don was truly sick either or, if she had, she hadn’t expected him to be languishing in it. “Has a physician been to see you? Ossika, even?”

A ruffled blonde head appeared from the covers, Don’s face shapeless in the dark as he squinted at them. Rain strode past, leaving Constant standing awkwardly by as she wrestled with the shutters. They’d left Pech back in the parlour rooms, examining the artwork there. Don didn’t speak and so, as Rain fought for light and air, Constant set aside his miserable day and crept closer.

“Constant?” Don asked. He sat up, looking bleary. He hadn’t shaved and he was gaunt, starting to look more like Daine at her worst than Daine currently did. He seemed _exhausted_ , or at some point beyond exhaustion, his eyes rimmed with red and his gaze flickering everywhere, never settling, never still. “What a pleasant surprise! Are we to breakfast together?”

“It’s late noon, Majesty,” said Rain gently. She won her battle. The shutter dutifully shoved open, letting coloured light filter in. It only made Don look worse. A glitter caught the corner of Constant’s eye, turning his head to glance at the stone-encrusted hearth. That was new, he thought. Don didn’t care for vanities as much as Savigny did. He didn’t even have jewels set in the pommel of his swords, but there were opals in the stone fittings around his bedroom now. Constant looked closer, realising that most of the fittings in here were new. This wasn’t familiar at all. The furniture which had been expensive and fine but battered by decades of being used as stages for Don, Daine, and Savigny’s games – complete with whatever animals they’d squirreled into the room – had all been replaced with dark-wood pieces without a dent on them. 

“Late noon?” Don squinted at the window. “That’s impossible. Someone would have woken me. Why didn’t you wake me, Rainary? What good is my guard if they don’t guard me from political disaster. Good lord, they’ll have replaced me with a conservative by now.”

He struggled out of the bed, which seemed to sap all his energy. He had to stop to catch his breath at the side, bare feet on the flagstone and wearing nothing but a loincloth. Constant counted his ribs and felt worse with every one.

Constant realised what was wrong about this picture.

“Where are your cats?” he asked, wheeling around looking for them. He’d never known these rooms to be devoid of them and their clutter. Half of Savigny’s duties had once been to patiently redistribute the inevitable kittens that Don demanded all be allowed to stay, lest the rooms become completely overrun. But now, there wasn’t a cat in sight.

He hadn’t seen a cat the entire walk through the palace.

Alarmed, Constant stood straighter, his own worries fled. Something was terribly wrong.

“Cats,” muttered Don, slumping further into himself. Rain, her mouth tucked into the line that meant she was worried and hiding it, approached close and then stopped herself, her eyes flickering from Don to Constant. A soft sound by the open door gave Pech away, watching mutely. Don, distantly, continued, “I don’t know. They don’t like it here anymore, if you can blame them. I don’t. Rainary, send the boy away. I can dress myself. Make him get food.”

“Majesty, it’s Lord Constant de Hartholm,” said Rain slowly in her deep voice. “And Viscount Pech. They seek audience with you. I think, however, I should fetch the physician. You seem confused.”

Don’s head snapped up, looking from Constant to Pech with clear shock showing. 

“No,” he said, standing with a half-bright, half-vacant smile. “Ah, of course. The Beltane portrait, how could I forget. I won’t be sitting today, Viscount, I’m afraid. I’d like to discuss it, actually, if you’d stay. Perhaps this year you’ll have a different subject.”

“As you wish, Majesty,” said Pech with a bow. “Though, the Beltane portrait is always the ruler, if I must remind you. It would break tradition.”

“Then break it,” snapped Don with uncharacteristic impatience. “Captain, where are you going?”

Rain hesitated by the door, unhappy. “The physician, Majesty …”

“I said _no_. I’m fine. I’ve simply slept too long, somehow. If there’s no boy, go and fetch food for us. Constant, see the Viscount to the parlour while I dress. I’ll be out momentarily.”

Rain, unhappier, vanished. The mutinous tromp of her boots was recriminatory. 

“I’ll see myself to the parlour,” Pech murmured, voice soft. This was to Constant. “Stay with him. If he’s drug addled, he might hurt himself or fall. Some drugs cause heart collapse in the withdrawal stage.”

Constant, heart hammering, just nodded. The door closed behind Pech. He was alone with Don, as he’d wished, but it wasn’t at all how he’d imagined it would be when he’d decided to flee his home and come here seeking comfort. Don had sunk back to the bed, trembling. There was something awful in here. Knives were rattling in Constant’s head.

“Oh, you stayed, Connie,” said Don, noticing he was still there with a bare smile. “Lovely. Come sit here. Weiryn’s Hounds, you’re big now. You haven’t visited in so long, what have I done to deserve such a treat?”

Constant decided on honesty.

“Pech thinks you might be drug addled,” he said, standing tall and trying to personify the lord that Rain had called upon to get him into the gate. He didn’t feel like a lord. He felt like a quivering, smelly, frightened boy, but he was here, and Savigny wasn’t, and there was something wrong with Don, who they loved. He had to be more. “I can see why. You’re acting very strange.”

“Pech would know, wouldn’t he,” said Don dryly. Since he didn’t seem to have the energy, Constant walked to the door that led to his closets and opened it, selecting clothes for his king. Don didn’t tell him not to, after all, just murmured thanks as Constant tossed them over. “You make such queer friends. Commoners and nobles and guards alike. Even twits like Pech. It’s what’s going to make you an invaluable lord, you know. You understand your people.”

“You’re not answering me. Is it poppy? Or a stimulant, like what Pech takes? You _shouldn’t_. Sav says stimulants aggravate the nerves. He told me never to take them unless I wanted to start seeing enemies everywhere, or start talking to walls.”

“I’m not on _drugs_ ,” Don snapped, then winced. He was dressing with sluggish motions, struggling with the fiddly buttons and ties of his outfit. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know my temper anymore. It’s a sleep condition, that’s it. I don’t sleep. Or I sleep too long. Never mind that. I really did want to speak with you, without Savigny looming over us like bad news. Though, last time I tried, you fell from a roof.”

Constant was mortified to be reminded.

“I might ask Pech to paint Solange this year for Beltane,” pondered Don. Constant, who’d lost the thread of the conversation, tried to backtrack to figure out if this was what Don had wanted to speak to him about, though he couldn’t see why. “She’s prettier. She’d be a much prettier queen than me, by far. Born first too, so the gods must want it. She’ll be here for Beltane, you know, which will be lovely, and – oh! Your birthday!”

He sprang up, bright-eyed. Constant blinked. He couldn’t tell if the confusion was getting worse or better. Surely even Don knew Solange wouldn’t let Pech paint her.

Don hustled past, going to open the rest of the shutters.

Constant felt like _he_ was the unhinged one.

“My birthday?” he queried.

“Yes! I bet that dolt of a brother of yours has forgotten, but I haven’t. It’s your last birthday before you inherit, which I can tell you is the end of _all_ fun. Let’s have fun!” Don flung open the last shutter and whirled, gesturing grandly as though expecting Constant to be reacting in some fashion other than his wary stance by the closet. Don’s excitement faded when he saw Constant’s face, his arms dropping. Even dressed, he looked worse in the light. At least the smoke was dispelling. “Good Gods, what? You’re so serious right now, I thought you were Savigny about to tell me joy has been outlawed.” 

Constant’s attempt to be a lord faltered at the casual mentions of his brother and the upcoming birthday. To his eternal mortification, he realised that his throat was closing tight around a ball of hurt, bringing heat to his eyes that no amount of blinking could cast away. No matter how much he reminded himself he had to be a lord for Don, who was in trouble, he was falling back into being a boy who’d couldn’t unwrap his brain from his miserable day. Savigny’s anger and his words, their mother’s ghost, Numair’s betrayal, Daine and Pippy, the horrible dark in the terrible room; it was all so much to carry, and he was still so small despite wishing he’d grow faster.

He’d wanted a friend when he’d come here, but instead he’d just found more fear.

He’d wanted a brother.

Constant breathed in and it was shaky and damp. In the quiet room, it was a cacophony. 

Don altered instantly, losing the manic excitement scraped thinly over the skeleton of a sick man. Suddenly, without warning or explanation, he was Don again; he strode forward with his usual pace, his expression familiarly soft, his arms open. It was all so easy.

“Darling,” he said, tone distraught, “what’s happened?”

Constant gave up today on being a lord and flung himself into that embrace, bursting into tears as Don hugged him tight. One arm pulling Constant firm against him, the other hand working tight circles into his back as Constant wept helplessly, furious at himself for being so unseemly even as something knotted in his chest burst in a sick, hot feeling of tempestuous relief. The whole time, just as Numair had for Sav but so much _better_ , Don whispered to him. Nothing of importance, really, but every word precious though they were simple comforts.

“I’m here,” said Don, holding Constant like he hadn’t been held in years. “Everything is going to work out, I promise. Nothing can hurt you forever.”

“Yes, it can,” Constant said wetly into Don’s ruined shirt, scrunching his eyes shut against burning shame. “Everything is _awful_.”

“Nonsense. I shant let it keep hurting you. I’m a king, you know. I can outlaw sadness.”

Constant bubbled a damp laugh that broke out despite himself.

Don let Constant break the embrace first, as he always had. He never let go a minute before he had to. “Talk to me,” said Don, leading Constant to the door. Constant hesitated, unwilling to let Pech see him like this, but Don didn’t turn into the parlour. Instead, he opened a side door and gestured Constant into the large room that served as a private indoor garden, one of Don’s favourite rooms. Constant smiled to see it. It was intact. Nothing in here was terrible or strange, everything familiar from the walls of cleverly cultivated plants to the small pond it had taken – Sav said – seven mages to learn how to set naturally into such an unnatural space. It truly was like stepping into a forest glade, though also very obviously still within a building. Small faces watched them from beside the pond: Don’s three river otters, clever faces mischievous as they ascertained whether the visitors had treats for them. Two were missing limbs. The third, an eye. They lived here because elsewhere would be death.

From the open doors that led out to the balcony, with its splendid view of the mews, an old tabby cat trotted in and ran to Don, who picked it up and babied it despite his eyes never wavering from Constant. Constant almost cried again at the sight of the cat, whose name was El.

“You didn’t redecorate in here,” Constant said in lieu of admitting his terrible mistake with Sav.

“Absolutely not,” said Don, wrinkling his nose. There was colour back in his face. He seemed calmer. “Cole said it’s not becoming, to keep fish-ferrets indoors, but I won’t be parted with them and they detest new things in their home. No fashionable new fittings for my girls. Honestly, sometimes it’s like living with Savigny again, all this fuss over shiny things.”

He smooched the cat’s nose, closing his eyes happily as she purred and bumped her own little muzzle against his face with sincere love.

“I’m glad,” whispered Constant, who was. But Don was still waiting, his shirt messy with where Constant had cried on it, and he knew he had to admit his disgrace. “I fought with Sav.”

“I figured as much,” said Don with a twist of his mouth, taking himself and the cat to the side of the pond where he sat on the divide between grass and rug. “He’s a trial. I bet he didn’t even mean whatever nastiness he spat at you so you should ignore it.”

“It was my fault,” Constant admitted, sitting next to him and watching the otters swim. “I upset him.”

“Ridiculous. Maybe you did, and that’s something you can apologise for if needed, but his actions in response to that upsetting are his own. Don’t give him an inch. I know you aren’t here looking so sad just because you shared some harsh words with your brother, though.”

Constant stared at the pond. His face burned. His stomach hurt.

He said, wishing it didn’t sound so much like a whine, “I’m a burden to him. He’s stuck here because of me, because our parents died and no one else could raise me. I’ve ruined his _life._ And I told him you’re getting married so he’s even _more_ upset with me, and now I’ve told you he’s upset so that’s even worse, and now I’m saying _that_ so –”

Don elbowed him, gently. Constant closed his mouth.

“I’ll remind you that no one puts Savigny where he doesn’t want to be,” said Don with a sad grin. “I exiled the brat, remember? He’s still here, pestering. And if he’s going around telling you you’re a burden he’s given up his fancy life to raise, he’s a liar and Mithros will have his lying tongue. _I_ wanted you, after your parents died. I requested you be brought to Court, to live with me and grow into your inheritance before it was thrust on you like it was Savigny and I. Savigny said he wanted you though and, for what it’s worth, I believe he truly did.”

Constant was flummoxed. “ _You_ wanted me?”

Don nodded. “I even petitioned Mother, but she wouldn’t overturn Savigny’s wishes even though we knew he was being a proud fool, taking on so much at once while grieving and injured and with Daine so unstable. You could have all come here, the three of you. I’ll never understand why he resisted. Anyway, that’s of no account now. You don’t need raising anymore. You’re a man grown, or so close to it it barely matters, and there aren’t any petitions needed. Constant, I make the same offer to you – if Savigny wishes to follow his own pleasures without realising that your company _is_ a pleasure, then let him. Come live at Court. You’re a year away from inheriting and, I’m sorry, but you’re sorely in need of learning how to run your estates. Savigny’s fault, not yours, but that ceases to be so once you decide to turn your back on the opportunity to become who your people need you to be.”

Constant was stunned, unable to speak as Don deposited his armful of elderly cat into his lap and stood, going to the cupboards set into the only wall not bedecked by greenery and shuffling through the contents. The otters, sensing treats, oodled closer and peeped amongst themselves.

“But my lessons with Numair,” Constant realised out loud.

Don, without turning from his search, said, “He can teach you here, whatever it is he’s teaching you.”

Constant very much doubted that, but knew better than to point out why.

“Daine …” he said.

“Has _always_ had a home here and she knows it. But even if she won’t leave Savigny, she’ll visit. You can’t live for her. She’s old enough to make her own bad choices, and she does such an excellent job of it I’d hate to take that from her.”

“But you’re going to be married soon with babies of your own,” said Constant dourly, “you won’t have time for us then.”

“I’ve a kingdom now and still time for my family,” Don retorted. He emerged triumphant, holding something bulky wrapped in fine cloth, which he carried over to Constant and sat down with, setting it on his lap. “Who told you I was marrying, by the way? Such swift moving gossip here. They haven’t even presented me my menu and already the courtiers chatter about my taste.”

He looked depressed, fondling the cloth of the object he was holding, shoulders slumped.

“Menu?” Constant queried.

“A selection of the finest ladies Galla has to offer, no doubt,” Don explained, every word sinking his shoulders lower. “All perfectly fertile and very political matches and not a brain between them since I have doubts my _lords_ want me finding an ally in their choice. Don’t think for a moment this isn’t anything but them issuing me with a spy wrapped around a womb. And I’ll have all the eyes in Galla on me, whips aloft, expecting a fine nuptial performance. The temple priestesses would stone a man for using a woman so, if I was a city-born girl being sold off instead of a man of the palace. Frightful.”

He gave up on the cloth and rubbed his eyes, shuddering.

“I wish you hadn’t told Savigny, though,” he said, finally. 

“Sorry,” said Constant, who hadn’t quite followed Don’s neurotic musings.

Don didn’t answer.

“I suppose that’s a small pleasure we can take from it.” Don broke the silence with this, Constant eyeing him curiously. “Out of all of us, Daine and Savigny are free from the terror of a panel of nobles picking their lovers and dictating their beds. You and I don’t really have that, do we?”

Cold sunk into Constant’s belly, shot through with a tight pain that suggested his bowels had just turned to water at the very thought. He wasn’t naïve. He knew exactly what Don meant, and it wasn’t a surprise. It just wasn’t something he’d considered as being imminent. A year. That was it. A year, and he inherited. He’d be a lord, and lords married dynastically.

It had never felt so close, and he wasn’t ready.

“Don’t look so frightened,” said Don, glancing at Constant with a woeful smile. “I might not be able to protect myself from the terror of marriage, but I doubt anyone will stop me shaping yours, if Savigny doesn’t do his duty by you. He should have been speaking with potential families years ago. Surely, your parents would have had candidates.”

Constant, nauseous, just shrugged.

Don pondered that.

“De Silvain, perhaps,” he said slowly. Constant’s terror froze, leaving a small, thin spark of hope. Eloise had _hounds_ … “She’s your type.”

“I don’t have a type,” said Constant in his quietest voice. 

Don, just as quietly, said, “That’s exactly what I mean. What’s going to happen to me, I won’t let happen to you. You will never be without allies. This, I swear to you. You won’t be alone.”

Constant looked at Don and didn’t let the relief he felt distract him from seeing what he needed to see, what was most pertinent about that statement. It wasn’t that he’d one day likely be betrothed to Eloise, or the tantalising offer of a home in the palace with the _mews_ and with Don and without ghosts – or Daine, or Numair, or Savigny – but it was this: 

Don had no one protecting him like he was swearing to protect Constant.

He was alone.

“An early gift for your birthday,” said Don, unwrapping the cloth, finally. It revealed a beautiful glove made of thick leather, designed to cover the entire forearm of a person to protect them from talons and beaks. “I was going to wait until Beltane, if you’ll permit me to celebrate your birthday with a party, but you seem so sad I feel you should have it now. Now you can give your splendid eagle the perch she deserves. Do you like it?”

Constant, staring at the glove, thought he might cry again. Don was watching him hopefully.

“I love it,” he said hoarsely, his voice thick.

Don beamed. “I knew you would. Here, take it. I wanted you to have something lovely but useful … Constant?”

Constant looked at him.

“You’re not a burden,” said Don, his expression firm. “You never have been. You’re loved, and you’re valued. Savigny will realise that one day, but you don’t need to stay small waiting for him to figure it out. You can be incredible without him.”

There was a knock at the door. Rain, Constant assumed, returning with the food. Before Don bid her to open it and enter, he found the words he’d left back on the bedroom floor.

“Don?” he said, looking at the glove which was the most magnificent thing he’d ever been given. Don looked at him in return. “Rainary’s your captain, not a servant. You shouldn’t talk to her like you did. People won’t follow a man who doesn’t respect them, especially if he’s their king.”

Don stared. Constant felt dizzy with the bravery it had taken to say that.

“That,” said Don, “is why you’re going to be the finest lord in Galla.”

Constant had so much to think about, he didn’t immediately go inside once he returned home late that evening. He put Thibault away with a thorough rub and a feed before climbing up to the roof, where he sat watching lights over Galla go out one by one as fires and lanterns were extinguished. Night settled over the mountain, immovable, unremarkable. The sky overhead was alive with more stars than were imaginable. It was a clear, cold night. 

The Immortal hawk landed beside Constant as he stared up at the sky. It walked to Constant on awkward talons, whispering in its metal voice inside his head. Constant petted its beak, which it graciously allowed. It smelled of rum. He dearly hoped it hadn’t damaged, or drunk, any of Sav’s precious stores.

“You followed me, didn’t you?” he whispered to it, marvelling in its metal feathers. “I felt you flying overhead. Is that why Pippy didn’t? I hope you didn’t eat any of Don’s hawks. He loves them all, you know.”

The Immortal clicked its beak and made crunchy hawk sounds, sullenly staring about. Constant studied it and realised it was holding something in one talon, which explained its lopsided gait. He held his hand out, not really expecting the creature to give its prize to him – but it did, with another surly clatter. It was one of the opals from Don’s hearth and, with a guilty grin, Constant remembered Don throwing open the shutters to the afternoon light. The Immortal must have flown in through the open upper inlets and worked the stone free from its setting. He’d have to take it back, even as he examined the deep amber glow of its insides, set through with every kind of colour.

“It is beautiful, but you can’t keep it,” he scolded the Immortal, who stared at him as balefully as though it had known. “I also can’t keep calling you it. You need a name.”

He sniffed, nose watering from the Immortal’s acrid alcohol-scent.

“Sav really won’t like it if you’ve drunk his alcohol and I call you Rum,” he teased. The Immortal shuffled its wings and didn’t answer. “Rum? Huh. Well, okay. That will do.”

They sat in silence together, boy and bird, before Constant said out loud what was bothering him the most as he looked out over the city, filled with people who looked to Don for their world.

“How can he be such a good person but a _bad_ king?” he asked the Immortal, who was preening with little tinkling clinks of beak on metal, like shuffling a spoon tray. “He cares so much. I don’t understand … how can people be one thing but also another? I want him to be good to _everyone._ Not just to me.”

From below, he heard the balcony door creak and froze. Someone was listening to him. 

Numair.

Resigned to his lecture, Constant tucked the stone in his pocket and watched his bird, waiting for Numair to drift up before him. But no foreign mage appeared. Instead, there was a sigh, and then the whisper quiet sound of someone climbing up the subtle footholds made by the decorative divots in the stone.

It was with a lurch of unpleasant shock that Constant saw Savigny’s head appear, the rest of him shortly following as he nimbly pulled himself up onto the roof and walked with catlike grace across the gutter to where Constant was sitting. Neither of them spoke as brother sat next to brother, the Immortal between them. The silence was as heavy as the thick blanket of stars above, all watched over by a leaden moon.

“I think Rum might have made a mess in your cellar,” Constant admitted, finally. “Sorry.”

“He did,” was all Savigny said to that.

Rum hiccupped birdily.

The silence returned until one of them, Savigny this time, broke it.

“I can’t advise you on why Don is how he is,” he said. His features were softer in the moonlight, Constant noticed. Almost pretty. A distant part of him hoped he’d grow to be as nice to look at, if only so Eloise wouldn’t mind having to see him every morning. “Things seem very simple when you’re little, but then you grow up and it turns out everything, even the people you love, are more complex than you ever imagined. Nothing is perfectly good, or bad, or kind, or mean. Don loves passionately, but he’s also capable of a passionate disregard. Everything he does is shaped by that.”

“You’re saying he doesn’t love his people as much as he does us? The mages, I guess. Those are the ones he hurts the most.”

“No,” said Sav. “I think he couldn’t love everything as much as he wishes he could or he’d explode. I don’t know. I need to apologise. I was terrible.”

Constant studied his fingers. “Don says he wanted me when our parents died. That he would have taken me in. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t have said yes if you didn’t want to raise me. It would have been better than losing all that time …”

“No, it wouldn’t have,” said Sav, turning to grab Constant’s chin with one hand and make him face him. Constant wasn’t good at eye contact, but he sensed it was important right now, and so he tried. “Constant, I love being your brother. I love the time we have, it’s a _gift_. You could have died that night but you didn’t and I’m thankful every day for that. It’s what drives me.”

“You got belly cut, not me,” Constant pointed out, thinking of that blood-spattered door and shuddering. Sav’s blood spilled for Constant’s life; blood and time, gifted to his brother. What was he doing with it to repay him? “Daine got me out.”

“What I mean is, urgh.” Sav let go of Constant, ruffling his hair feverishly with both hands like the gesture would help shake loose the words he was fumbling for. It left it unruly. “You’re not and have never been a burden to me. If anything, I don’t give you the attention you deserve, but I … I’m explaining this badly. I _do_ sometimes resent the time I’ve lost, but not to _you_. I resent that our parents are dead. I resent that my magic was crippled until Numair was sent to us. I resent every minute Don spends with his head up his arse because it’s another minute less I have beside him, and if you _ever_ tell him that I will hurl you from this roof so hard not even Numair can bring you back.”

Constant couldn’t help it; despite his sore heart, he laughed at that.

Sav, abruptly and with a peculiar intensity to his voice, changed direction. “It’s like this, Constant, just … I don’t mean to be how I am, I truly wish I could be more for you, but I’m … do you ever feel like you’re two different people fighting over one body? Like _dogs_ over meat, but neither is winning. All they’re doing is ruining it for everybody. There’ll be nothing left once they’re done.”

Constant was baffled. “No?” he said, sensing it was the wrong thing as soon as Savigny’s expression closed off. “No, I mean, maybe? I don’t understand. I …” Finally, he had to admit. “No. Not ever. I’ve always known who I am. Don’t you?”

Sav was silent. It wasn’t a nice silence. It was as heavy as a blade.

“Sav?”

“Never mind,” said Sav, too light. “You’re right, it didn’t make sense. Of course I know who I am. I’m the worst brother in the world, a real brat. And I’m sorry, Constant, I’m so sorry. Numair … I shouldn’t have needed him to spell it out for me, but I did and I’m a fool and I’ve missed so much I should have seen. I’m going to do better.”

Constant thought about that. It was more than he ever imagined getting from his brother. A week before, he’d have been ecstatic. But now …

Now he was thinking of Don, strange and alone. He was thinking of the people of the city who looked to the palace and saw no one there protecting them. He was thinking of spies and sicknesses and Magisri Ossika and Rain and Pech. He was thinking of Solange and of his people back in Hartholm, who didn’t know or care that Constant was a boy being raised by an absent, reluctant brother. All they knew was that no one cared for them either. Constant and Sav were here in the city, distracted by other things, and it wasn’t right. It was how Sav had lived, but it wasn’t how Constant could be. He was thinking that it was time to be the person his brother had risked his life for, his parents had died for, the one that Don thought he was.

“Don wants me to live at the palace with him and learn to be a lord,” he said with soft finality, seeing Sav inhale hard enough to hurt. “Something isn’t right up there, Sav. There’s a bad feeling all over it, and Don is … different. I think I’m going to go. He needs someone to protect him.”

“That’s not your job,” said Sav, openly afraid. “The palace isn’t a good place for you, and you’re just a boy.”

“No,” Constant replied, as firm as he needed to be even though it was terrible how much he could see he was hurting his brother, “I’m not a boy, or a child. I’m a lord, and that means I protect my people. Like you protected me.”

Sav stood, shaking his head. “No,” he repeated, jaw stubborn, eyes furious. “That’s not your place. You little fool, I almost _died_ protecting you! Our parents _did_ die protecting us, or did you forget that? What on earth makes you think that me, or Daine, are going to let you skip blindly into more danger than you can possibly imagine? Not even Numair can protect you there!”

“Because you can’t stop me,” said Constant. He stood so they were, theoretically, eye-to-eye, though a few years stood between him and that goal. Savigny, however, didn’t stand up to the challenge. He threw his hands up in a rage and turned his back, stalking away to the balcony climb. “Where are you going? We’re not _done._ ”

But Savigny didn’t answer. He just left.

And Constant was alone.


	20. Putting Descartin Before the Horse

Savigny hadn’t come home and Constant was refusing to speak to any of them. He wouldn’t close or lock the door of his room, but he was giving off such incredible vibes of ‘go away leave me alone don’t even look at me’ that were so Savigny-esque that Numair didn’t dare press the matter. For a lack of anything else to do, Numair and Daine left Constant to his terrific sulk and retreated one door up – within shouting distance if Constant decided to talk – to Daine’s old bedroom. Daine propped the door almost closed, but not quite, and they sat together with Daine on the stripped bed and Numair sprawled languidly on the floor. They didn’t light the fire. It was probably so stopped up that they’d smoke themselves out if they tried. Numair did warm the room by magic though, as the night crept on and he noticed a tinge of cold paling Daine’s fretting hands.

They didn’t speak at first. Numair read a book and Daine, badly, knitted. Once she gave up on that – expression disgusted – she began to prowl around the room, as though caged. Numair let her prowl.

“What are we waiting for?” he asked after some hours had passed and her restless activity was beginning to infect him too. Constant was silent, though the occasional _thump_ of something being thrown gave him away as still awake and still angry.

“I don’t like that Savigny left in a tiff,” said Daine, circling the room again, kicking at a dusty dresser, picking at a lace edging, rattling a faded jewellery box. Numair wondered if she felt strange about being so oddly placed into the room her younger self had existed in. “He doesn’t … oh, you don’t _know_ him.”

“So tell me,” said Numair. “I might surprise you.”

Daine looked at him intently for some time. Another bang echoed down the hall from Constant’s room – they both winced – but, finally, she flopped back onto the bed, coughed as the dust rose in a puff, and then gave in. She slithered to the floor, inching across it to take a seat beside Numair before springing up again. Numair sighed. He set his book aside.

“Would it help to walk?” he asked.

Daine said, “Please.”

They walked in silence out to the courtyard, shivering under the early morning chill. It was before dawn. The night sky hadn’t begun to fade yet, and Daine looked up at it as Numair studied the warped ground of the yard. As she gathered her words, he began to fix what he’d broken, walking back and forth along the yard with his Gift laid out neatly around him, reheating the stone and smoothing the ground below it where it had bubbled up. Daine didn’t comment on this.

“He’s not like he pretends to be, you know,” said Daine, stalking after him as he worked his way around the yard. Numair kept quiet. She didn’t need his commentary; she just needed his attention. “He thinks faking something will make it real so he’s wrapped himself all up in pretend. Then when things snarl up like bad fleece around the fakery, he bolts.”

“Constant said it was him saying he’s thinking of going to the palace which caused it,” said Numair with faux calm. He himself wasn’t sure how he felt about that proclamation. Constant had assured them it wouldn’t stop him coming to Numair for lessons; lessons were the least of Numair’s concern. “I admit, I don’t know enough about the king to know why Savigny would take against that so hard. It’s my understanding that Donatien is close to Constant, no?”

“Yes,” said Daine, hunching her shoulders. Numair spared a small amount of Gift to seep into her clothes from the stones below her boots, stopping her trembling. Mountain mornings were frozen. “He, I mean, we. We are. They’re my brothers, Numair. Not my trueborn brothers, but brothers still. Ma … she didn’t give me trueborn siblings. I don’t know that she knew Da long enough to, or maybe she thought he’d come back one day and then they’d get around to it, but in any case, it didn’t happen. And then the bandits came and I was alone, except for Cloud.”

“How old were you?” asked Numair, setting the ground into place as he spoke.

“Thirteen,” said Daine, defiant. “Old enough to be on my own, I suppose. Younger girls have struggled more. I was supposed to be a boy. Vauquelian was going to be my name, except then I was born a meu so she had to adapt. S’pose Ma didn’t mind so much, even though she had her heart set on a little fil to spoil. Maybe one that looked like Da but with her Gift. After that, she decided Vauquelian would be my brother’s name, but he never came. Then she died. Maybe it was good Ma didn’t have more even though she wanted them so bad. I buried her and Grandda and all our animals, even the stupid ones … I don’t think I could bury a brother.”

She scuffed her boot on the warm cobbles, some complicated not-quite-a-wobble movement going on with her chin and mouth.

Numair’s heart was so twisted up he didn’t think he could speak, not even to query the unfamiliar slang terms. He was picturing the small waif from the oiled portrait, young and alone and digging graves for her entire world.

“I went a little mad,” Daine whispered, so soft that Numair knew she was scared of him hearing this. He rubbed his hands on his breeches to dry his clammy palms and turned to her, finding her trembling but steady, watching him with her stubborn gaze. Daring him to judge her. “I was so angry. I went to the wolves and they hunted the bandits with me. Then I was a wolf. I don’t remember much for a time after that.”

This was a lie.

He let her have it.

“And now instead of having no brothers, I’ve got three,” said Daine, recovering superbly from the shake in her voice and the misery in the slope of her firm, archer’s shoulders.

“That time in between,” said Numair with genuine caution, sensing that their conversation was more uneasy than the stone beneath their feet, which was flat once more, though no longer textured as cobbles. It was instead a flat slate, strange to look upon but with its own beauty. He sensed it might become a death trap when it rained though. He’d have to contemplate that further. “You were alone?”

Daine, puzzled, shrugged at him.

“Between the wolf time and finding Savigny,” Numair explained. “Unless there was no time at all, really?”

“There was some,” she admitted. “I wasn’t quite fifteen when they found me in the Bog, half wild. Don was barely twelve. The Gods only know what the Prince Royal and his Gift were doing in the Bog, but I’m glad, I guess.”

“That’s a year and a half, or so,” Numair pointed out. “If you were thirteen when your family died.”

“Yes,” she answered without expression.

There was nothing to be said but, “It must have been lonely before them.”

“I like being alone.”

This wasn’t a lie, he sensed. Daine seemed very content on her own. “So do I,” he said, thinking of the long, desolate road between Carthak and Tortall, “but it’s not quite the same when you’re not choosing to be so, is it?”

Daine was quiet for the longest time, though she still followed him as he walked around the building towards the east wing, intending on examining the structural damage there while he was inclined. It wasn’t until they were there and Numair was crouched by one cracked corner of the foundation before she spoke again.

“Savigny must trust you to take you to bed,” she said, which Numair winced at. After she’d declared Savigny her brother, though it put down any concerns he had of Savigny marrying her, it did make discussing the courting of him uncomfortable. “So I guess I have to trust you too.”

“I’d prefer you trust me because I’ve proven that I mean you no harm. You should trust me on your own judgement, not Savigny’s. Flirting doesn’t mean anything when it comes to laying secrets on each other, especially if those secrets aren’t yours to lay.”

Daine tilted her head, eyes shadowed in the gloom.

“I trust you with Sav,” she said, which he knew wasn’t at all the same as trusting him with herself, though he took it as a compliment anyway. Abruptly, she turned the topic back to, “I don’t know why Sav is so against Constant going to the palace. It wouldn’t be terrible for him.” Numair looked up from the foundation to glance at her, surprised, but she wasn’t done. “I know you listened in on me and Savigny talking that time, about Cole. It’s got to do with Cole, I’m sure. But that’s it. That’s all I have. Sav doesn’t _talk_.”

“This Cole,” said Numair with some distaste, “I want to know more about him. Savigny’s Gift and the bindings Cole taught him to lay on you and Constant, they were nasty pieces of magic. Abhorrent. If it was this Cole behind them …”

He trailed off, but the anger in his tone was there enough that Daine recognised it. She appeared thoughtful, coming to sit in the empty garden-bed on her heels, back against the wall. 

“I thought he was just a bad teacher,” she admitted. “Maybe too friendly with the switch, though Savigny never had bruises. Figured he wouldn’t if Cole was smart. Don’s old tutor slapped Sav once, for running away. Right in front of us. Don was so outraged he ordered the man whipped, though he’s never had the stomach or the heart for that. He bawled the entire time the guards carried it out.”

Numair was baffled. “Donatien cried but still allowed it to happen anyway?”

“He was twelve,” said Daine, somewhat defensively. “And he changed his mind as soon as he’d calmed down and Sav had seen a healer for his nose, anyway. He just gets stupid when people he loves are hurt. Blood makes him panicky. His ma said a king had to never be seen as changeable or weak, but, and she wouldn’t let him belay the order. We all got made to watch as our punishment for running, though she also said anyone who struck any of us again would see worse than a whip in the future. So if Cole was using a switch, he had to be coy about it, especially since Don’s never been sore at Cole and he would if he’d seen Sav bruised up.” A small, sly smile lit up her mouth, though her eyes stayed grim. “He’d know too, considering they were sharing beds by the time Don was fourteen. There’d be no hiding marks.”

Numair had to sit down, leaving the foundation alone for now. None of this was alien to him. He’d seen worse in Ozorne’s court, after all. But it was still appalling. They’d been _children._ He also suspected he knew exactly how Cole had punished his ward without leaving marks, and the thought made him sick right through.

And Daine didn’t know.

“Did Savigny ever speak to his parents about Cole hurting him?” he asked, knowing the answer.

“Of course not,” Daine replied. “He’s never spoken to any of us about it. I had to _guess_. Cole’s the sweet of the palace babies. They all adore him, so why would anyone think he was hurting one but not the dozens of others he spoils? It doesn’t make a lick of sense. I don’t think even I’d think it if it weren’t for me not knowing Cole as well as some, and because I do know _Sav_. He’s not a cringer, but he cringes when Cole shows his teeth. Why would he do that unless he’d been forced to heel? That’s what I meant when I said I don’t like him being out on his own after a spat. Animals hide when they’re hurt so they can die peaceful without attracting attention, and it feels too much like that. Like he’s learned too good to hide his bruises so now he can’t show them at all, even when they’re bleeding him dry.”

He heard what she was warning him: Sav was out there right now hiding his bruises, laced this time with fear his brother was going to fall into the same traps he had.

“He’s been gone hours now,” said Daine. “Plenty of time to find a mess and roll in it.”

Numair opened his mouth to ask what she meant by that, but there was a bustle by the front gate. Hooves and voices, the hooves heavy and the voices irate. Numair gestured for Daine to stay, though she ignored him and followed anyway. It was too early for such a fuss.

Guards dressed in the colours of the city were leading their horses through the servant’s gate, bickering amongst themselves. Numair cleared his throat to get their attention moments before he realised why their shadowed silhouettes were so strangely shaped. One led the horses. Two carried the motionless shape of a haggard human, draped terrifically across the guards’ burly arms.

“Oh, joy,” said Daine with a sigh as the guard holding a lantern stepped forward and the light cast by it illuminated their burden better.

“Fair morning, Madame Sarrasri,” said the guard with a dour but vaguely amused smile. “We’ve found a cat that belongs to you. Shall we put him in the rain barrel?”

Savigny sure looked like he could use a drenching, Numair admitted. He was conscious, but barely, and even from where they stood Numair could smell alcohol. He’d obviously left here and fallen straight into a vat of wine before proceeding to drink his way free of it. Eyes narrowed against the glare and with the distinct thousand-yard stare of the truly inebriated, Savigny peered out from the cage of arms functioning as his sense of gravity and stared beyond Daine and Numair, expression inexplicably outraged and sleepy all at once. His hair was a mess. There was vomit on his shirt, which wasn’t the one he’d left here in, and he’d lost his silken vest and one boot. A closer inspection of him revealed, also, that one of his eyes was bruised rather than narrowed, his lips and knuckles bloodied.

“You look pretty,” said Numair to Savigny, who made a low hurking noise which implied he was about to vomit again. The guards didn’t even ask. They simply – in a well-practiced motion that Numair envied – moved in concert to sling Savigny out of their grips and into the garden that ran alongside the path, Savigny vanishing with a gurgle into an overgrown mass of the flower known as bear’s breeches.

“Do they often fling their nobles into bushes?” Numair whispered to Daine, who grimaced.

“Constant and me have both assured them he won’t remember tomorrow,” she answered glibly. “He makes them do this enough that they’ve earned some tossing. I don’t have coin for you.”

The last was said apologetically to the guards, who seemed unconcerned. Working the upper city as they did, Numair doubted they were thin on bribes. 

“No problem, Madame,” said the guard with the lantern, offering a bow that was too low for Daine’s status but certainly respectful. “We’re happy to ensure his safe return home. However, it wasn’t us who found him.”

A parchment was offered, Numair taking it as Daine went to peer into the bush at the whimpering Savigny. It was a writ stamped by the lower city watchhouse issuing a fine for brawling and public intoxication ‘unbefitting a citizen of Galla’ made out to a ‘Donny Reinesri’ and declaring that the property of Donny Reinesri, comprised of eight copper bits and a poignal along with one ‘tired’ brown gelding, was being held in lieu of payment. Atop the fine would be feed and care of the gelding until such time as the debt was declared unpaid and the belongings sold or it was paid in full.

“Was a spot of luck, Gil finding him as it was,” admitted one of the guards. “Was delivering a message to the middle city watchhouse and spotted him in the drunk box dressed like a commoner and doing his best impression of midden scum. Recognised him instantly. It’s a wonder the guards there didn’t – he’s a regular.”

“New guards, high turnover,” said another guard with a shrug. “Morning watch would have brought him home. Looks like he’s been carousing his way across the Bog too. We’d have brought his horse too, if we could, but it’s more than our jobs to go fetching nobles’ horses from swampies. Perhaps you should put a tag on him, like nobles do their fancy hounds. Then they can toss him over the wall when they find him.”

“If found, please return to,” sniggered another guard. They laughed, briefly, but stopped when Daine levied a dire stare upon them. Murmuring apologies, they bowed and made their way out, leaving them with the puddle of Savigny luxuriating in his own mess in the bear’s breeches.

“What’s a poignal?” asked Numair.

“Fancy dagger,” answered Daine.

“And ‘Donny Reinesri’?” he queried, looking back down at the writ. “Savigny, they’ve got your horse. What did you _do_?”

Sav didn’t answer, just moaned. Daine, however, choked out a laugh.

“That’s _glory_ ,” she whimpered between giggles, digging her arms into the bush and hauling out a single socked foot. She tried to drag Savigny free using just that. Savigny appeared to be attempting to help, though his help was tangling him up further into the flowers. “Reine means queen. Sri means his mother’s son. He’s Donny the queen’s bastard, oh _Sav_. And now we have to find Corentin before Constant wakes up and realises he’s languishing at the crown’s pleasure. You’re a rubbish adult.”

“You’re rubbish,” Savigny retorted wetly, sitting up. “I want to go to bed. Where’s my bed? This isn’t it.”

“That’s a bush,” Numair offered in his efficacious way. “And you’re astoundingly drunk.”

“You’re astounding,” was Savigny’s short response, which Numair felt quite smug about as Daine looked put out. “I don’t feel well.”

They looked at each other, Daine and Numair.

“We can’t ride Thibault to the Bog to get the horse,” Daine said with a sigh. “Dapple horses are restricted to the nobility, plus we’d get knifed for sure for being so fancy. I can ask the Darragon house to borrow a mount …”

But she looked unhappy. Numair sensed why. Kittens and puppies were one thing; riding a horse entirely another. He added it to his list of something to ease her into – though with a familiar horse – and said, “I’ll put him to bed. See if we can borrow a mount and a map and I’ll ride down there before Constant is about. He’ll never know.”

“Are you certain?” asked Daine, eyeing Savigny. “They’re already fighting. It’ll be a brawl if Constant realises Sav’s been reckless with one of his beloved horses.”

“I’m certain,” said Numair optimistically. “You wait here and make sure Savigny doesn’t choke on himself while he sobers up. It’ll be simple.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” said Daine, eyebrows raised. “Everything you do is always so simple.”

He’d be a fool to carry coin in the Bog, he was warned, so it was with the Hartholm seal and a packet of papers declaring his officiality that he rode through the city carrying. Still worth plenty if he were robbed, Daine warned him, but slightly less likely the opportunistic brigand would recognise the value of. While Numair was an average rider, at best, his map-reading skills were adequate. He made fine time through the city, considering his situation. 

Constant in the palace would be an exceptional boon to him if it granted him access. The information he could gather to pass to Jon would be second to none with eyes and ears within the palace walls, especially Constant’s which seemed to miss nothing even if he didn’t fully understand the implications of all he was exposed to. Cole was a deep concern, however, as was the volatile King Donatien. Constant learned so fast it wouldn’t hold them back on their lessons too much, and it would give Numair more time with Daine and Savigny, Daine especially. With Numair’s attention divided, she was barely progressing. They’d hit a wall after her successful day, her fear infringing on moving further. Numair also needed to understand what it was that brought on Constant’s battle shock in order to ensure it didn’t cause him to lose control. And there was what Daine had hinted at, as well, the loss of herself to her animal mind. 

Savigny, too. His relationship with the king, his strange disappearance into the fog. His mental wellbeing worried Numair on a personal level; his odd and secretive ways on a professional one. The honeyed flames of his fire. A message? It had to have been. The strange mage, Nonny, they’d smelled of smoke and honey too, which was alarming. Why would Savigny be linked with someone so potentially dangerous?

Numair had idled off track while he was pondering. He pulled his borrowed horse up – the horse resentful of him – and studied the map to figure out where he was going. The sun was well above the horizon now, the streets washed with pale blue light. The Bog was awake, but sleepy, people dodging Numair with wary glances at his clothes and horse. No one bothered him. He was still on the main roads, which were well travelled by guards. There weren’t even beggars lining them.

He readjusted his route and started off, deep in thought … and then he looked around and his gaze fell on the idle stare of the patchwork mage, lounged against an alley wall and watching him with a sly smile. Once again, the mage was dressed in their patched outfit but, this time, overtop, they’d pulled a fine silk vest.

Nonny and Numair stared at each other for a long beat before Nonny mock bowed and vanished back into the shadows of the alley, taking with them Savigny’s vest. Numair didn’t consider for a moment the foolishness of following a strange mage into the alleys of the slums; That was Savigny’s vest on a person of extreme note. Numair dismounted and led the horse at speed down the narrow alley. Ahead, he glimpsed Nonny turning a corner and, with a hissed cuss, ran after him. The horse, unhappy, let him lead.

Another corner, Nonny flickering out of sight. Numair followed, laying out a thin line of Gift behind him so he could find his way back. If the mage’s intent was to get him lost, they’d be sorely disappointed. It would also be a nasty surprise for anyone who wished to rob or knife him, the work of a moment to lay a spell over himself and the horse that would give a nasty bite to anyone who snatched at them.

Another corner and, this time, Numair stopped. Mud below his boots sucked at them, his eyes narrowed as he examined the angled alleyway, still dark where the light couldn’t seep through the closely bound buildings. It didn’t take long for him to figure out why the alley looked so odd.

He turned and walked through the wall, the horse baulking and leaving him half through the illusion and looking down on the shorter mage, who grinned.

“That’s a superb illusion,” said Numair without expression in his tone, glancing back at his arm emerging from the seemingly solid wall. “I’m not certain I could do better.”

Nonny swept into a capering bow, smile not shifting. It was eerie. Numair looked at them too, then swore again, softly. He blew a frustrated gust of Gift about, sweeping the illusions away like a broom through cobwebs. The illusioned mage vanished, nothing but an image set to make a fool of Numair. The faux walls did too, leaving him in a dead-ended courtyard he must have been circling like a fool, the horse now truly anxious.

Savigny, what are you mixed up in? Numair thought, turning his attention to the yard in case there was a reason he’d been led here beyond the mage feeling mischievous. He saw it immediately. There was a set of stairs at the end of the yard, barely visible. They led down into a door set into the solid stone walls of the building that loomed crookedly above. There was nothing intriguing about it at all, this grimy, piss-scented, midden-soaked corner of the slums, except for the tiny bird scratched into the soft brick that lined the stairs. It was a raven, beak open, wings splayed, with a red thumbprint pressed into its breast like a wound.

Numair soothed the horse, thinking.

Then he tied the beast to a hitching rail, made sure he left enough dismaying spells around it that anyone with an idea of stealing it would instead decide to turn themselves into the guards as a horse thief, and went down the stairs to the door. It opened at a push of his hand, and he entered.

A dark hallway met him, squalid and stinking. His nose twitched and he, unhappily, edged his way down the unlit length, eyes struggling to adjust. The smell lessened as he went. The only thing he was glad for was how dry the floor was below his boots. The hall curved. His footsteps echoed, fingers trailing the walls as much as he wished not to touch anything. At intervals, the hall would widen and then narrow again, seemingly inexplicably. Numair, however, suspected there was a very purposeful reason for this; those wide pockets would provide perfect positions for defenders to hold an invading force filtered through the narrow hall, giving them the space to fall back and pick off their foes at will.

He came to a door and slid another spell over himself, this one taking him a moment of deep thought as he wound it so tight and unassuming that, as long as he didn’t walk in on a matter of great secrecy, most eyes would slide right off of him. It was a spell he’d perfected, having been an eye-catching man on the run in his youth. Sometimes, avoiding attention was as simple as acting as though he belonged; thus, anyone who looked at him now would see what they expected, if they noticed him at all. He was proud of it.

He entered the door.

It wasn’t at all what he’d expected.

He found himself in what appeared to be nothing more than a niche tavern catering to a decidedly roguish clientele. It was large and smoky but clean, barely inhabited at this time of the morning except with those few who seemed as though they’d been left there from the night before. Three men talked over a table of dice, none of them even glancing at Numair. The barkeep lounged against a table, talking with a woman in a server’s outfit.

Numair, startled, made his way across the room to a table. He could smell something cooking and his stomach gurgled, though he was still uneasy. Why would a tavern be operating in such secrecy, yet so close to the main road? He considered how long he’d followed Nonny down the alley … and he realised he didn’t know. He’d thought it had been only three, four turns. But had it? What time was it now?

Someone tapped the table and he jerked his gaze up, blinking with surprise as it met that of the server, who looked suspicious. Below the make-up and dress, the facial features were masculine, expression narrowed. Numair was thrown for only a moment – having spent so much time with players and artisans, this was only surprising because he hadn’t been at all expecting it – before he looked around again with a new eye. The drunken couple whispering sweetly to each other in the corner, he now realised, were two women; the man drinking alone by the great heath had the same red thumbprint glowing on his cheek as the sniffers had at the fair so long ago; one of the gambling men wore the distinctive red rouged face paint of the Gallan night ladies. Though the other people he could see were dressed plainly, Numair suspected each of them would have their own reasons for finding themselves here.

“You don’t much belong, I don’t think,” said the server, not at all put off by Numair’s working on himself. He supposed they wouldn’t be. He hadn’t at all shaped it to fit him into somewhere coveted by those who felt they didn’t belong anywhere else.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Numair quietly, giving them a soft smile. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that Galla is accepting of those of unconventional desires. Why is this lovely place so tucked away?” He hazarded a guess and offered a polite, “Ma’am?”

The server’s expression didn’t soften an inch, though she nodded.

“Hard times make hard people, and there are always easy targets for hate,” was all she said. Numair allowed himself to look as visibly sad as this made him, and, finally, she gave in – just a little. “Ma’am makes me feel like my mother. It’s Adrienne. You’re not from here, that’s certain.”

“And you’re not a server,” said Numair, who’d noticed the knives the woman wore.

This earned him a grin.

“Tender and observant, how pretty,” said Adrienne, hooking her serving platter under one arm to leave her other hand free, which she put to her mouth and issued a startling whistle with. Heads lifted, bleary eyes staring at her. Numair saw one man look from Adrienne to him and then do a visible double-take. He didn’t look familiar, but Numair memorised his face anyway. “Remy, look at our new friend. He thinks he belongs here.”

A woman appeared from a staircase leading up, looking even more out of place than Numair in her rumpled woollen dress and mousey hair bundled back into a bun. She was small and dimpled with grey eyes that seemed perpetually squinted, as though she was short of sight or suffering from seasonal sniffles. She aimed that squint at Numair. Numair assumed this was Remy.

“How’d you come about here?” Remy asked, her voice lilted. Her fingers, Numair noticed, were ink-stained, her lips dry and chewed upon. She wore a knife, too. 

He decided to be honest.

“I followed a queer mage,” he said, Remy’s squint worsening as she exchanged a glance with Adrienne. “I believe their name is Nonny?”

“We’re all queer here, love,” said Adrienne with a smirk. This earned some outcry from the small crowd, some denying it, some agreeing. Some were silent, just watching. Some hadn’t even looked up. “What’s Nonsense want with you, though?”

Remy stalked closer, vibrating with a manic intensity Numair recognised. He’d personified it himself plenty of times before. It was anxiety meeting interest meeting hyperawareness.

“Nonny’s a knife,” she said coolly but no less dangerously for her seeming mildness. Numair knew, here more than anywhere, appearances would be extremely misleading. “We don’t allow knives in the front and Raven knows it. If you’re one of hers, you came in the wrong door.”

Numair’s heart was hammering, though he didn’t let this show. “I’m no knife,” he said.

“A mage, though,” said Adrienne, looking at him again. He met that gaze, seeing something in there, a flicker of white-edged power. Sighted. 

“Yes, a mage,” he agreed. “I don’t know Nonny, or this Raven though. I have no idea why she would have led me here, wherever this is.”

“This,” said Remy with a jagged smile and a touch of her fingers to her belt, “is the Bottom of the Bottle, Master Mage. Le fond de bouteille. Welcome to the dregs of Galla. It’s also a sanctuary and by entering it you promise to adhere to that. Do you know what we do to those who threaten sanctuary?”

Numair shook his head.

Remy leaned forward.

“We feed them to the knives,” she said tenderly. “And Raven has many, many knives to feed.”

“May I meet this Raven?” he asked without flinching. His brain was racing: he was wondering if this was the Rogue’s court of Cría, performatively felonious. It would be an astounding stroke of luck if it were. Where better would he find the information he needed?

“When Raven wants to meet you, she’ll croak,” said Remy with an absent smile, angled into a mean shape on her dimpled face. “And if she finds you wanting, so will you. Adrienne, feed the strange man. Then send him on his way. We’ve marked his face now. If Nonsense wants anything else done with him, they can do it themselves.”

Numair opened his mouth to speak, but someone cut in. The man who’d been shocked to see Numair before had stood and approached, saying, “I’ll escort him out, if you’d like. No doubt the illusions would have gotten him coming in and he’ll end up looping in circles out there.”

Remy shrugged and left without another word. Adrienne vanished with her platter. Numair and the man were left alone, surrounded by listening ears.

The man, who had a large nose, soft hazel eyes, and hair that was closer to grey than brown, smiled at Numair. “Well met, strange mage,” he said, his expression peculiarly intent. “Descartin Cavailsra, at your service. Shall we share a meal?” Sitting across from Numair, he leaned against the table and, to Numair’s amusement, winked, his fingers rapping nervously on the table in a repetitive beat. “It’s not often I get to break my bread with one as handsome as you, if you’re into battered old garts like me, anyway.”

“Gart?” asked Numair, distracted briefly by bread and soup before his brain caught the tail end of the finger rapping. He focused on that as he ate.

“Gallan commoner slang for man,” said Descartin, beginning the pattern again. “Gissy for woman, though be careful tossing that one around. Some take it to mean the working kind. Meu and fil for girl or boy child, or the unisex gosse for either until they age out of showing their knees. You are decidedly foreign, dear. It’s no wonder you stand out in a crowd, even one as sleepy as this one. You need a teacher.”

Numair thought of his students, hiding a smile behind his bread. “I know three people who’d be very amused to be told so. Fortunately, I’m a quick learner.”

While he spoke, he was deciphering.

Once he was done deciphering, the relief was astounding.

Beginning the pattern once more, Descartin laughed. “A respite, to be sure,” he said with his mouth, as his fingers rapped out in Numair’s personal cypher, ‘The Whisper Man sends his regards’.

Numair followed Descartin back to his lodgings.

“Don’t worry,” said Descartin as they settled the horse with feed and water before making their way inside, “No one will steal him here. The Raven’s mark is on this house and they’d be fools to do so.”

“I hope my attendance here isn’t questionable,” said Numair with cautious indifference. The last thing he needed was to be closely associated with Descartin if the man was caught as one of George’s.

“Ahh, doubtful,” said Descartin with a lowered glance back that was decidedly coy. “They’ll assume I’m entertaining. And why not? So handsome a man.”

This was said as they ascended the common stairs, Descartin unlocking a door leading to his room with a gesture, still flirting. Someone giggled as they vanished within, Numair taking stock of the bare room – and laying quick muffling spells upon the space – before turning back as Descartin closed and locked the door.

Abruptly, the flirting ceased. All business, Descartin turned to him.

“Did you ward? Good. Do you have any idea how much trouble we’ve had getting close to you?” Descartin shook his head, looking irate. “You’re never alone! And there’s no getting into that building of yours. How on earth did you find the one noble who doesn’t keep a staff? I was told you would make this difficult but I didn’t realise how much of an underestimation _difficult_ was. We couldn’t even get birds in! They won’t cross the grounds.”

“Who told you I’d be difficult?” asked Numair, offended.

“Everyone,” said Descartin with ill humour. “I’m not even supposed to be making contact with you. I’m here as an inset into the Gallan Rogue’s Court while my partners support you, but they couldn’t get in. I believe they’ve taken up positions with a noble, Lady Eloise de Silvain, somewhat in proximity to your location. They have funds for you too – I don’t have access to those.”

“Slow up,” said Numair, still caught on the earlier parts of the man’s information. “That _was_ the Rogue’s Court?”

Descartin shook his head. “No, I couldn’t get in with the Rogue,” he said with a frown. “You’d think the fool would at least want a sniff at me, coming into the city covered in the smell of Corus’s Court all over me, but he wasn’t interested. Something is very strange in that Court. What kind of Rogue loses half their kingdom to a gaggle of rebel mages and their allied outcasts?”

“A weak one,” supposed Numair.

“Or a distracted one,” Descartin added, shaking his head and leaning back against the wall. “It’s not all lost though. This Raven, she’s a dangerous gissy, that’s for sure. While the Rogue’s closed his court, she’s opened hers. Mages all over the city are flocking to her and more every time the king tightens the leash on them. Not just mages either, but everyone agitating for change. If this were happening in Corus, the Rogue would have an army behind him. Here, this Raven’s stepped in and gathered them all under her wings. I don’t know what she’s planning, but if this place ignites, she’s going to be a powerful contender. Don’t let the Bottle fool you. The rebellion they’re brewing is organised, fierce, and dangerous.”

Numair, thinking of Nonny, knew that he’d never have been fooled by the quiet tavern anyway. “The mage, Nonny …?”

“Extremely alarming,” said Descartin grimly. “Here’s an unpleasant piece of information for you. Nonny is known to us. I wasn’t a birdy when they were operating, but my partner was. Why do you think we separated so fast before contacting you? We thought we’d been caught two minutes in, if that Nonny had spotted her.”

“Nonny knows you?”

“Nonny knows my partner, one of them. Potentially both. They’re Tortallan, Salmalín. Ex-Whisper Man’s. And she said the parting wasn’t at all amicable.”

It explained why they’d immediately recognised Numair, he realised. And complicated things. 

“Define ‘not amicable’.”

Descartin laughed, though it wasn’t a laugh as Numair recognised it. It was utterly merciless.

“Put it this way,” he said, “the Boss is really not going to like that Nonny is still breathing.”

Numair frowned. “A problematic spy?” he queried, not really wanting to know the sordid details of George’s work. It would make it harder to lie to Alanna.

Descartin, however, wasn’t at all careful. “A traitor assassin,” he said without compunction. “They were a knife then, and they’re a knife now. And a fearsome illusionist. Beka – my pair – she wasn’t even sure of their face back then, only their name and their clothing. There are illusions wound through the stitching, you see. Very recognisable. But they can so freely alter their illusions, there was no catching them once they fled Tortall. Even now, I couldn’t tell you anything about them – their true name, their sex, their birthplace. Nothing. Just that The Whisper Man decided they were too unstable to keep alive, and that before that … well, I think you can imagine the danger behind an ex-Tortallan assassin now working for foreign powers.”

Numair, unfortunately, could. He hated to think of Jon using an assassin, especially through George; he wasn’t naïve enough to think he wouldn’t though.

“The murders of the Gallan nobles …” he mused, cold striking hard.

“I’ve heard about those,” said Descartin. “Wouldn’t shock me. Indiscriminate was the definition of Nonny when they were with us. Recall Lord Bortel.”

It took Numair a moment to remember.

“Died of a sweating sickness,” he said, startled. “It took most of his household, didn’t it? I remember His Majesty having to reissue his fief to a distant cousin because it took the whole line.”

“Perhaps a sweating sickness, but Beka doesn’t think so,” said Descartin with a pained look. “Since Boss raised holy hell over it. Swept right through his ranks, and I don’t mean with a gentle pat on the rump as he fired those he found wanting. I’m talking mass graves in river mud, and a bag of freshly minted coins put on the head of our friend Nonny. Whisper is that the mage went rogue and took the lot of them out, right down to the babes. Now I trot over here, and what do we have but whole bloodlines wiped out and a familiar insanity right at the centre of it. I’m thinking when you call in, you might want to confirm with the man himself, but my feeling is that he’s going to want this particular loose end tidied up.”

Numair scratched at his chin as he thought that through. He doubted George or Alanna would request he kill the mage, but he knew they would ask him to – if possible – return Nonny to Tortall to face the king’s justice in whatever form that took.

“Is there anything else I should be aware of?” he asked.

Descartin nodded. “From what I’ve heard, you’ve got a nasty little breakout of Yahzed here,” he warned. “I don’t know more than that since I’m no scholar, but if you’re looking for the centre of all this building hatred against mages, I’d start there.

This was almost as unpleasant a discovery as the one that Constant was in contact with an assassin mage. Yahzed was a wholly unpleasant God, and one that Numair had never enjoyed stumbling into believers of. They were a vicious, retributive crowd with priests who loved nothing more than senseless sacrifice in the name of holy appeasement, and wherever their temples sprung up so did discord and strife. They also loathed magic. Numair disapproved.

“Are there temples here?” Numair asked, grim. They’d be his next destination once he’d obtained and returned Corentin. 

“Yeah. And they’re crowding out the kinder gods. Weiryn the Hunt God is a favourite of most Gallans, but he’s losing ground to Yahzed, and so is the Mother Goddess. I don’t abide much by portent, but shifts in a nations’ gods causes unrest and we’ve already got too much of that. Last thing we need is celestial meddling. One last thing of note – there’s hunger in the lower city.”

“There’s always hunger in the lower city,” said Numair with regret for the truth of it.

“Aye, but this is deeper. You’ve got rot in the wheat stores and sabotaged flour stores. From what I’m hearing, Galla’s just come out of a hungry winter with a king that’s only present when he passes harder restrictions on mages for what many see as a personal vendetta, if they don’t agree with him and blame the mages for their troubles. I don’t think I need to warn you what a hungry winter leads to if it’s not followed by a good harvest.”

He didn’t. Numair understood.

“Mynoss be kind,” he whispered, closing his eyes as he took all that in. “We’re too late to turn this back, aren’t we?”

Descartin laughed that laugh again. “I give King Donatien a year,” he said with an ease Numair didn’t share. “If something doesn’t change, he’ll be assassinated by midwinter and Cría will burn. No regent outlives a starving population, at least not for long, and definitely not in Galla.”

Numair, unhappily, agreed.

‘Tired’ brown horse, Corentin, retrieved and returned to his stable, Numair took a moment to examine him. It didn’t take long to find the illusions spells stitched into the horse’s tack, nor to disable them. In fact, it took less time than the pondering of it did, Numair taking a moment to brush the horse free of the dust of the guardhouse stables now that it was once more a glossy white with spots so black they were almost blue. He thought, as he worked, not just about what George’s man, Descartin, had told him but also about the horse’s cleverly stitched tack, and about the strange vests that Savigny wore. It didn’t seem likely that the Marquis of Galla was involved with rebel mages, but Savigny was an unlikely man, and the Raven’s rebels were, according to Descartin, organised. A noble supporting their cause would make them powerful indeed, and Savigny had – by Constant’s word – mage friends in the Bog.

Silent and thoughtful, Numair left the horse and found his way through the silent estate until he knocked gently at Savigny’s door. There was no sign of Daine or Constant, who were probably sleeping off their late nights. There was no answer within. He entered anyway.

Savigny wasn’t asleep. He was crumpled and miserable within his covers, opening his eyes with a pained moan when Numair came in. Numair, silently, fetched him water and then toed off his boots and crawled into the bed with him, letting Savigny lean on him as he cautiously sipped.

“I feel tragic,” Savigny said, folding himself back into the bed and lying almost facedown. His voice was slurred.

“I think you’re still drunk,” said Numair. “Was that fun, your spectacular tantrum?”

Savigny muttered something rude into the bedcovers. Numair frowned at him. He _was_ still drunk. Leaning close, Numair sniffed at the man and then swore, again. Savigny didn’t stop him ruffling through the covers until he emerged with an empty flask, just hid his face, lying there splendid and ridiculous.

“You’re going to poison yourself,” Numair snapped, throwing the flask with no small amount of temper behind the gesture. It clattered against the hearth and stayed there. “What could possibly be so terrible as to deserve such histrionics? Constant going to the palace? Ridiculous! If you’re worried for him, talk to _me_. Do you think I’ll let anyone hurt him? Or is this your little love affair with the king? Now _that’s_ foolishness. I can promise as someone with intimate knowledge of unstable kings, loving them will end in nothing but blood and misery.”

Savigny was suddenly upright. Numair didn’t flinch. He was close to anger himself; there was no need for this floundering. “You don’t know _anything_ about him,” snarled Savigny, outraged. “How dare you assume! You are _nothing_ compared to him. You, you –” He spluttered, too incensed and drunk to use language. Numair let him splutter. It would do him more good than drinking himself to death. “You have no idea,” he finished weakly.

“Don’t I?” asked Numair. “I promise I know more than you expect. Whatever you give up for him, it’s not worth it. He’ll let you burn and never extend his hand to save you, if he doesn’t light the match himself.”

“When he is cut, I bleed,” Savigny mumbled, looking at the palm of his hand. “It’s how it is. I was born to bleed for him. What am I without that?”

“You’re you, for a start. Why do you need to be more? I like you just fine as simply Savigny, without all the titles and frippery. I think your problem is that you’re too dramatic to appreciate a life where you’re not required to bleed for the people you love, where those people wouldn’t _ask_ that of you because it’s inappropriately possessive.” Numair’s anger had faded as fast as it had come, reaching out and taking Savigny’s hand in his to cover the expense of the man’s palm he was studying. Savigny, startled, looked up to meet his eyes. “I wasn’t born to serve my possessor, and you weren’t either, Savigny. Won’t you believe me?”

Savigny, quietly and in a dazed, sickened voice, whispered, “Together, we are spectacular. Without him, I am nothing.”

Numair stared at him. There was nothing he could say to dissuade Savigny of his tragedy, he realised. It was too deeply embedded. At least for now. So he tried something else.

“Savigny,” he said, ensuring the man’s full attention. “Who is Raven?”


	21. The Left Hand of the King

Savigny didn’t answer Numair that day, nor the next. The conversation hung heavy between them, with Numair returning to his bedchambers and leaving Savigny alone with his dismay in the tangled sheets of his desolate bed. What Savigny had said lingered with Numair, refusing to let him focus on Constant’s lessons in meditation – at which he was still below average – or on his gentle tempting of Daine to reach out to the animal world she was surrounded by yet apart from.

Savigny had said, “Please don’t ask me that until I’m ready, please.” His eyes had been wide and the closest to frightened Numair thought he’d ever seen them.

“Why not?” had been Numair’s quiescent response. It dropped between them like a stone into still waters, the impact pushing them gently but inexorably apart. 

All Savigny had said in response had been, “I can’t.”

Numair left it there.

It was four days later when Numair woke to a whisper of Gift outside his closed door. Naked and alert, he stepped over there with his own Gift brilliantly awake, tugging the door open just enough that he could peer out into the darkened hall. There was no one there but a subtle glow. Numair looked down, and then gasped with delight.

Numair crouched, finding a folded piece of parchment tucked against the door with the delicately crafted illusion of a rose standing atop it, captured in the act of being most alive. It was a lambent pink, faded at the edges and as fragilely hued as glass. Numair was afraid to cup his hands around it and lift it closer to his eyes to examine it better, as though touching it would shatter the pretence that it was real.

Some time later, he recalled the parchment. He unfolded it, finding a single line of Savigny’s exquisite handwriting scrawled with graceful anxiety across the page. 

_I do not beg nor apologise easily. I am too proud. I am also sorry for my harshness. Please, allow us to continue._

Numair gathered the gifted construct, the parchment which he knew must be the final attempt of many, a robe to spare Daine or Constant’s eyes if they met him on the way, and then he left the bare guest room behind and returned to where he’d come from. Savigny, as Numair entered, was awake, looking up at him without a word from where he was sitting on the bed locked into a kind of static, manic intensity. His eyes drifted from the rose construct to the parchment.

“I’ll do better,” he said to Numair. “Apologies without action are manipulation. I have no intent to manipulate you. I just … I cannot tell you about Raven yet.”

Numair eyed him. “Are you in danger from her?” he asked.

Savigny, with a hoarse laugh, said, “In ways you cannot possibly imagine.”

Daine had a knife to Savigny’s throat. Numair walked into the kitchen and paused on the threshold, for a moment concerned that this was further baffling sibling behaviour before he saw the warm towel tossed over Savigny’s bare arm and the copper bowl of steaming water set before them. Savigny’s eyes were closed. Constant wasn’t there.

“Do you not shave yourself?” Numair asked, amused, as he wandered past them and perused the basket of bread delights he suspected had been sent over by one of the families who considered Constant theirs to feed. 

“I do,” said Savigny, Daine jabbing his throat with the blunt end of the blade as a warning to stop moving.

She continued for him.

“He likes to be pampered like a noble lady’s idle hound.” Her voice was lovely, Numair was reminded, descending back against a heavy counter beside the bread and watching her work. Her hair was tied into a mass of pleasing curls, her face filled out. No longer hollow or haunted, she was settling back into her skin. He loved to see it. She kept up as she swept the blade with practiced elegance over Savigny’s jaw, leaving the skin smooth. “If I pretty his face for him, he does my hair in return. It saves me fussing. If you like you can go next, Sir Scruffy Mage.”

Numair readjusted his posture against the counter. His mouth dried as he noted the wet tips of Savigny’s short hair curled against his skin, the masculine scent of the shaving liniment Daine was using, the way that Daine had rolled the sleeves of her white shirt up so they were tight against her browned arms. He tried to distract his appetite with the bread roll, with middling success.

“Numair?” Numair looked back at them to realise that one of Savigny’s eyes was open and he was watching Numair, no small amount of amusement visible. “Would it please you?”

It would, Numair wryly thinking of the state of his hair and face, but he wasn’t certain he’d survive such proximity. Their truncated tumble the week before had done little but remind him he was a creature of flesh with the same needs as any other.

“Tilt,” said Daine, distracting them both. Savigny, obedient as any man to the woman who held a blade to him, tilted his head back to expose the bare expanse of his throat.

Numair began to consider a cold bath. He also realised something alarming. Despite his odd and secretive self, Savigny was the kind of man who Numair knew he could easily fall into loving in quite the usual way. This was dismaying information. He was here for _Tortall,_ not for his own fancies, and sharing a bed was exactly nothing like sharing a heart. Unexpectedly hot and awkward all over, as it seemed no matter where he looked in the cavernous kitchen his eyes always fell back on Savigny’s damp skin and soft mouth and casual disregard of the knife, Numair sought for something to do with his hands. 

When he glanced back at his companions, they were both staring at him.

“You can _juggle?_ ” Daine said, open-mouthed and – Numair noted smugly – openly impressed.

Savigny looked like he was choking on a laugh. His eyes were watering. Numair glared at him.

“Glory,” whispered Savigny, “hark at the maestro mage, master of his craft. The marvellous and mystical bread man.”

Numair threw the rolls he’d been juggling at him, each one landing with precise accuracy, and brushed his hands free of the crumbs.

“Children,” he sniffed loftily.

The children, unperturbed by his scorn and both covered in bread, cackled like hens.

Daine tossed the blade onto the table, stepping back and shaking her head. “I’m going to wake Constant,” she declared, turning on her heel and striding out. “Wipe your face, Sav.”

“Ma’am,” murmured Savigny, straightening into a somewhat upright seat and reaching for the scented lotion for his skin. Numair watched him daub it across his cheeks before he slunk forward and onto the bench beside him, heart hurtling. “What?” asked Savigny, turning to face him – only for Numair to take the chance to kiss him, tasting liniment and lotion, feeling the heat of irritated post-shave skin against his mouth. Savigny, voice husked, exclaimed, “Glory!” again and dragged Numair onto him, both of them kissing in a messy, dirty fashion as though it had been all either had been desiring. Something clattered to the ground. There was bread under Numair’s foot.

“Is this working for you?” teased Numair when they broke apart for air, half sprawled onto the bench. 

“Are you blind?” gasped Savigny, hauling him back down with a handful of Numair’s hair. “Obviously. Perhaps I should shave you, if it gets you so fearsomely excited.”

Numair groaned, a sound ripped deep from within his chest. “I wouldn’t last,” he admitted. “You’d ruin me.”

“But how spectacular you’d be ruined,” Savigny promised. At the intent in his voice, Numair shivered from the curl of his toes right up his long body to the tips of his hair. Perhaps that would have been the end of it, that glorious quivering pleasure, if Savigny hadn’t taken advantage of Numair’s paramount distraction to put his hand where it hadn’t been just yet.

Numair uttered blasphemous things.

The galloping of footsteps down the stairs, echoing through the empty halls, roused them from each other. They broke apart, handsomely undone, and put as much distance between them as either could bear. It was impossible to pretend nothing had occurred; Numair found himself unable to tear his eyes away from the gape of Savigny’s shirt over his chest, his wet curls, his parted lips. Savigny, to his credit, seemed equally as captivated by something about Numair. They were both panting.

Daine burst in, though she seemed either unaware or uncaring of their distracted states – both of them, Numair noted with a shrill giggle he immediately regretted, sliding down on the bench to hide their waists under the table before they turned to look at her – as she skidded to a stop.

“Constant’s not here,” she said, pursing her lips. “Would you two stop pawing at each other like cats in heat? I don’t think he came home last night.” 

Savigny sat bolt upright, soft expression gone.

“His birds?” he asked.

“Not here either,” said Daine. “He’s gone to the palace, hasn’t he?”

This time, it was Savigny’s turn to incite the gods’ wrath with his blasphemy. Numair dearly hoped none of them were listening. The last thing they needed right now, on top of everything, were gods.

“Are you certain?” asked Numair of Sav for the third time, walking beside him as they travelled the short distance between estate and palace on foot. “I sincerely doubt he’s in any danger. Daine and I can –”

“Did I not say it’s fine?” snapped Savigny, fretting at the stiff collar of his outfit which, somehow, was even more resplendent than usual. It was an outfit that Numair had had to step back to fully appreciate when Savigny had emerged from his rooms in it. He wore a sapphire blue tunic ornate with silver embroidery. A wide silver sash around the waist only made it more apparent that liberal amounts of Gift had probably been utilised to pour him into the tight pants. An ornate rapier hung at his hip, the grip splendidly wrought. The whole thing was set off by high boots, which Numair envied for their fleece inner lining as a barrier against the freezing Gallan roads, and a short cape which was a deep blue-black on the outside but, inside, showed to be a warmly lined emerald green. Every time Savigny lifted his arm to fuss at his hair – Numair didn’t say anything about the jewelled ear drops the man had added, or the silver rings, or the white rose pendant around his throat – there was a surprising flicker of green against the calmer blue of his tunic. It was turbulent and eye-catching. Numair liked it all very much, but especially the pants.

“It doesn’t sound fine,” said Daine, who was trotting to keep up with Savigny’s long-legged stride. She and Numair walked either side of him, like a vanguard against his anxiety. They weren’t doing a very good job. He seemed stressed. “You’re dressed like you need to prove a point. I haven’t seen you this fancy since –”

“Enough, Daine.”

Daine exchanged a glance with Numair, one that said, ‘he’s not fine’, though hers was more amused than Numair’s. Numair was having second-hand nervousness, which was another troubling sign that he was in too deep. He shrugged. He and Daine were dressed as they usually were, though that was mostly because they were both in borrowed clothes and could hardly glitter up for the king even if they’d been inclined.

Savigny abruptly stopped, causing a gaggle of young noble women to have to break and walk around him, muttering about his rudeness – though Numair saw two of them turn and openly ogle Savigny’s rear. Savigny seemed astoundingly unaware of them. 

“It is my fault, isn’t it?” he asked, turning on Numair. Numair almost tripped trying to step back so they weren’t uncomfortably close. He wiped his palms on his breeches. “All of this, everything with Constant. What did you call it? The Black God’s shock, that’s my fault too.”

“The sun doesn’t rise because Savigny de Hartholm forgot to extinguish his candle,” scolded Daine, Savigny wheeling on her instead. She met his gaze with her own much steelier one. No damp palms there, Numair was relieved to notice. “You’re being fair foolish. Yes, it was stupid to go drowning your words instead of speaking them, but Constant is fifteen in two weeks. If he chooses to run away because of a spat with his brother, that reflects on him. What’s the Black God’s shock?”

She looked to Numair, who had to clear his throat an embarrassing number of times before he could speak. What a mess he was today, splendid spy or not. 

“Mind wounds left in the aftermath of battle or attack,” he explained hoarsely. “Anything that causes extreme distress can cause it, really. It’s like an echo of the original shock.”

“Like pain in a badly healed bone?” Daine asked.

Numair nodded. “Exactly like that, except in the mind and much, much harder to heal. It manifests as inexplicable bouts of terror or, more subtly, as erratic behaviour, as though the sufferer is attempting to avoid further injury. Avoidance, high alertness, isolation.”

“Nightmares?” Daine asked sweetly.

Savigny stilled.

“I believe so,” said Numair with caution.

Daine turned that blue-grey stare back onto Savigny. “How do you heal it?” she asked without looking away from him. With every second she kept her gaze on him, Savigny seemed to be getting more and more uncomfortable. 

“I don’t know,” admitted Numair desolately. “I’ve heard of mind healers, but there are few texts on it, and I haven’t met one myself. There are some grounding tricks I’ve learned to counter acute manifestations, but nothing long term. Perhaps reduction of the avoidant behaviours may help, such as exposure to the frightening stimuli … like animals.”

Daine looked utterly betrayed, whipping around to scowl at Numair. Feeling much calmer now his mind was thinking about something academic versus how much he wanted to hold Savigny’s hand, Numair was able to beam back at her with all his usual gusto. Then she looked past him and her mouth opened into a lovely o of shock. Numair and Savigny turned too, realising the crowd behind them was parting to let through a procession of riders surrounding two carriages. As bidden by the guards atop their fine black horses, they all stepped back too. This fetched Numair up against the brick wall of the building behind them, Daine under his arm and Savigny leaned very gently to his other side, shoulder-blade cocked back against Numair’s chest. 

In the muddle of the tightly packed crowd shoving to try to get a look at the passers-by, Numair felt his hand bump Savigny’s. Savigny felt it too; their fingers brushed again, deliberate this time. Savigny curled his through Numair’s and they held each other. 

Then Daine twisted into Numair’s arm with a gasp, both arching away from the procession while also craning forward. It was a painful gasp that she made too, the whole effect quite chilling. Numair turned to her, alarmed; Savigny was still watching the carriages, unaware.

Daine covered her eyes, trembling. Numair touched her shoulder and then, suddenly, she was crushed against his chest with her face buried in his shirt. He could feel her damp breath hot and fast through the cotton. Surrounded by strangers, Numair didn’t try calling down to her to see what was wrong. He simply hugged her, surprised to realise this was the first time they’d embraced. He was surprised she was _letting_ him. He eyed the procession for a reason, seeing the fine gilt-edged carriage, the curtains pulled to hide those inside. The guards in the black and whites of the Gallan royals, roses splashed across their surcoats. The well-bred horses with their dainty lines, each of them black under their dusty coats. Travelling behind the two carriages on a line, two of the superb spotted horses Daine had said were the nobility’s treasures … and, between those fancy steeds, there was a small, grey pony.

Daine, though she wasn’t making a noise he could hear above the noise of the crowd, was shaking against him. His shirt was wet. He winced, hugging her tighter in the wake of it. 

“Cloud?” he asked.

Daine shuddered again. “Don’t,” she said into Numair’s sodden shirt. “Just don’t.”

A hand brushed Numair’s stomach as he watched the procession vanish up the road towards the palace. Numair looked down. Savigny had turned back to add his own voiceless comfort to their embrace, stepping in and giving Daine a soft, one-armed hug and brushing a kiss against her hair. It was quieter now as the crowd dispersed. Numair heard them chattering about the king’s sister, realising that that must have been who’d passed by.

“Do you want to go home?” Savigny was asking Daine, who shook her head.

“No,” came her muffled, angry voice from Numair’s shirtfront. Savigny’s eyebrows lifted, his mouth twitching at her obstinance in not letting them see her tears. “I can do this.” Finally, she looked up, smiling at Numair with a guilty tilt to her mirth. “I’ve ruined your shirt.”

Numair looked down at the damp patch.

“Ah well,” he said idly, releasing his arms from around her and shrugging. “I’ve knelt before better kings in worse. No offence, Savigny.”

Savigny, clearly offended, just sniffed.

They were given entrance into the palace grounds as soon as Savigny was recognised, which was quickly. Numair wasn’t used to people kneeling as he passed, so it was an unpleasant discovery that kneeling seemed to be the way Gallans deferred to their Marquis. 

“They kneel for you?” he asked Savigny as Savigny strode through the neat lines of bowed heads, the guards having dropped along the stone tunnel leading into the grounds. Though Numair tried to whisper, his voice carried. “Not bow?”

“I am the king’s birthright,” said Savigny distractedly, his attention ahead. “As much as part of him as his left hand or his crown. A symbol of his reign. They don’t kneel for _me_ , but for the king. I am simply an extension of him.”

Numair was horrified. In the back of his brain, he was seeing Savigny wrapped in his sheets, tumbled into bed drunk and distraught. He was hearing the man declaring that his king gave him his only value; he was remembering Daine telling him how Savigny had been given to the crown as nothing more than an infant. He was trying to imagine what twenty-six years of being reduced to another man’s limb could do to someone’s conception of self. And he was dearly wishing Savigny had been born almost anywhere other than where he had been. 

They were out of the tunnel, crossing the grounds. Numair could see beautiful gardens to the left of the palace and what looked like a wrought iron dome of some design to the right, overrun with flowering creepers. Around them, there were wide expanses of stone paths intercut with fields of clover and wildflower. For visibility, he knew, looking up at the palace ahead and marvelling in the beauty of it despite the obvious signs of defensive architecture built in. They approached grand doors which took two guards to each side to sweep open. No servants’ entrance here for them, Numair hearing someone announce Savigny’s arrival – and, to his surprise, a follow-up announcing ‘Lady Veralidaine’. 

Numair saw servants drop to their knees as they passed. Uncomfortable, he sought to look anywhere else and found Daine watching him. 

“It’s just how things are done here,” she said, more privately now than if they’d spoken in the tunnel and falling behind Savigny, who probably wouldn’t have noticed if they’d started dancing on the stones so intent he was upon the palace doors. “I don’t like it either, really.”

“The kneeling or the concepts behind it?” he asked.

She looked startled. “I don’t …”

Numair looked away from her, a spark of anger beginning to simmer as he imagined how easily _he_ could have been tangled up in a madness with just the same flavour as this as a child. Stripped of his independence and his agency. How would he have recognised he was being taken advantage of if that had been his only exposure to …?

Ah, he realised, looking at Savigny and understanding, now, why no one had ever heard him decry Cole. 

He felt so very tired of Galla following that understanding.

“Savigny is not another man’s left hand,” said Numair, even softer. Daine blinked up at him with her thick lashes giving her a stare that was decidedly less fierce than he knew she could be. “It is a monstrous thing to stunt a child’s sense of their own value in order to ensure they serve another’s interests. That’s not loyalty. It’s slavery.”

Daine, chewing at her lip, didn’t answer. She just turned her focus onto Savigny’s back and watched him without saying a word as she mulled over what Numair had said.

They were being shown through the entrance hall, which made Savigny’s estates look positively garish in comparison. There were plants _inside_ the building. Not just potted ferns and flowers either, Numair doing a double take as they entered and he spotted a great tree growing in the space between two sets of curved stairs. A water feature trickled around it. The room was painted in whites and blacks, making the sprawling, overgrown tree the most shockingly colourful thing there.

“Of course, you may wait in comfort while we alert the king of your –” the man speaking to Savigny was saying but, judging by the high-pitched whine to his voice, he was being ignored. Savigny dodged him, striding for the stairs. Daine and Numair followed. “Marquis! Lord, I must implore you –”

“Stand down, Jelt,” said another voice. Feeling like he was drowning in a sea of new faces, Numair met the gaze of the woman descending the stairs to greet them and almost gasped with relief. It was Rainary, in uniform now but familiar despite this. “I’ll take them. With me, My Lord.”

She offered a barely polite bow and turned on her heel, ascending once more without looking back. They followed.

It was not to the king she took them, but a room which she waved the guards away from and closed the door upon them. Numair warded without telling them, pleased when he saw Savigny turn and study the wards before nodding.

“Your brother is here,” Rainary said to Savigny, earning a soft affirmation from him. “That’s the least of our problems, though. Something is wrong with the king. Constant and I saw it days ago, in his chambers, but we’re having it confirmed now. Lady Solange knew it as soon as she set eyes on him.”

Daine stirred.

“With her Sight?” she asked, her tone curious. Rain nodded. For Numair’s sake, Daine added: “Solange is Don’s elder by three years. The Queen had her abdicate to him because she wasn’t seen as fit by a few of the older peers, and she thought it would weaken their rule.”

“Because she’s female?” asked Numair, trying to remember how inheritance in Galla descended.

“Because she’s blind,” said Savigny. “They didn’t know about her Sight then or else it would have been that that disqualified her.”

“Doubtful,” said Rain bluntly. “The Alaires have a lot of practice at hiding in plain sight.”

She stared at Savigny a little too long, the man looking away. Numair pondered that, suspicion sparking. He couldn’t remember seeing a Gift buried within Don, or the Sight, but that didn’t mean much. If it was small or for whatever reason muted, he wouldn’t have seen it without searching. Or, he realised with an unpleasant jolt, if it was bound. But he was sure Savigny would have told him if that had been done, after Constant. Surely?

“Nevertheless, the question was asked how a queen could rule people she couldn’t see,” Savigny finished harshly, “and the crown was passed to Don.”

Three years would have landed Solange’s birth much closer to Savigny’s than Don’s was, Numair considered, wondering about how sharp Savigny’s tone was. How had those interim years been, with a blind infant princess and, he assumed, Savigny bound to that princess as her birthright until a more ‘able’ sibling had been conceived?

“Is he well?” asked Savigny with hesitance. There was no question who the ‘he’ was.

“No, obviously not,” snapped Rain, Savigny stiffening at her tone. “I wouldn’t have hauled you in here if he were fine, would I? Some said he’d improve with Cole gone –”

“Cole’s gone?” Savigny said, breathless.

“Diplomatic mission to Carthak, last I heard,” replied Rain. It was Numair’s turn to hold his breath. “He’ll be gone until the turn of fall. I don’t particularly hold with those who think he’s behind whatever is chewing on His Majesty, but I did hope that removing the _pressures_ he represents might assist with His Majesty’s … mind.”

“What about his mind?” It was Daine’s turn to query. “We saw him mere weeks ago and he seemed tired, at worst. There’s nothing wrong with his mind.”

“It comes and goes.” Rain sounded uncomfortable, her gaze latched to Savigny, who was undergoing a series of emotions ranging from apprehension to disbelief to outrage. Numair had never seen him so expressive, though it may have been that only now was he paying this much attention. “He’s with the peerage now, discussing title rights. I doubt you’ll be admitted –”

“Who sits as the Hartholms?” Savigny interrupted jerkily. He was fretting at his collar again. Numair sidled closer. Not too close, just close enough that he was visibly there. 

Rain said, very quietly, “Constant.”

Savigny nodded. The nod wasn’t smooth at all, but halted, anxious, episodic. 

“Where is Solange?” he asked, looking at Daine as though for guidance she couldn’t give him. She seemed as equally unsettled as he was. “You said she saw something wrong? I can’t imagine she’d be sitting somewhere quietly away from him, surely.”

“Oh, most definitely not.” Rain reached for the door – Numair hurriedly dropping the wards – and moved through it without waiting for them, sure they’d follow. “She’s _irate_.”

This proved to be an understatement.

Numair’s first glimpse of the woman who would have been queen by birth if it hadn’t been for a perceived deficit was that of her back turned to him so all he could see was a pink gown almost the same shade as Savigny’s gift and the elegant masses of dirty blonde curls. It was barely tamed hair that was, nevertheless, stunning; Numair knew at that moment that this woman was most definitely Donatien’s sister. It seemed infuriatingly lovely hair was a familial trait. 

“I cannot _believe_ they persist in removing my brother from me,” she was snarling, her voice rich and clear, her tone incendiary. “These men, they call _me_ blind! Outrageous. I’m not shocked my brother is going daft surrounded by such –”

“Lolly,” said Savigny.

The woman spun in place, hands clapped together with a soft cry of delight. Numair caught a glimpse of a haughty face, pale but bold and only accentuated by the startling sight of her clouded eyes, before she’d flung herself with far too much enthusiasm across the room. Numair almost cried out, certain she’d trip or crash into some piece of wayward furniture, but Savigny met her midway in a hug, and there was never a moment she was anything but sure of foot. She kissed the air by his cheeks twice on both sides with savage excitement before bringing her hands to his face. Numair noted a beautifully carved cane leaned against a settee, the designs too intricate for him to clearly see from where he stood.

“Savigny, dear lamb,” she said, thumbs brushing his mouth, his jaw. Savigny seemed unperturbed. Beside Numair, Daine was muttering, ‘lamb’ to herself and barely not laughing. “How wonderful to feel you again, oh, I’ve missed you. What is happening here!? Not a single cat has greeted me! And Donny …”

She trailed off, unhappy.

“Greetings must wait,” was her next declaration. Without looking at those she addressed, she called out, “I want everyone out but the Marquis, the Lady Veralidaine, and Captain Rainary. We will have privacy.”

“Numair, you stay,” Savigny added as guards and staff filtered out. 

Solange didn’t speak again until the room was empty, though she didn’t wait for anyone to verbally confirm that it was. Instead, she asked, “Is Numair the mage? You burn tremendously bright, Master Numair. I almost cannot bear to turn in your direction, you’re so brilliant a form.”

Curiously, Numair asked, “What is it you see, if I may ask?”

Solange smiled. “I don’t _see_ ,” she teased, Numair feeling a blush beginning to pool upwards as she turned her face towards him. For the first time, it truly occurred to him how beautiful she was. It was all of Don’s aggravating prettiness, but finely polished with confidence and poise. Devastating. “Not as you do, anyway. Perhaps, if I do ‘see’, it is a tapestry instead of a ribbon. I can alter my perception to those who physically share the space I’m occupying, such as now, and you appear as blazes of being.” She pointed to Daine. “Daine is a copper flame, much stronger now than she was. I was always worried one hard breeze would snuff her out.” The finger drifted to jab Savigny in his stomach, making him frown. “Savigny is a lovely pink star. I find him so comforting. You’re my favourite colour, lamb.”

Numair couldn’t tell, but he suspected Savigny was blushing if only from his lowered lashes and shy smile. Solange seemed to have that effect. She would have been a terrifying courtier, or queen.

Now the finger swept to Rain.

“Don’t tell me,” said Rain, cutting her off with a grimace. “I don’t want to know what your witch eyes see.”

“So bladed, darling,” said Solange, grinning wickedly. “You were nicer when Daine’s kisses blunted your edges. We were such terrible children together, all of us. You must kiss Nora for me. I adore her.”

The finger landed, finally, on Numair.

“I presume you, mage, are the one responsible for such changes in my friends’ luminance,” she said. “Daine’s strength and Constant’s freedom. He gleams now, as though refined. It’s so gratifying. And Savigny … I never realised before now, but you’re different too. Cleaner? I can’t tell exactly what’s altered, just that you have. Do you doubt me, Numair? I can feel you doubting. Look at me and tell me if you doubt.”

Numair altered his vision, almost going knock-kneed himself as she flared white to his eyes. Even after he turned his mage sight off, spots danced in front of his eyes; he’d almost snow blinded himself looking at her. _How_ they hadn’t realised she was Sighted from her very birth, he had no idea. She was the strongest he’d seen while still, he assumed, sane and aware of her present reality. He’d seen stronger. They hadn’t been either of those things. 

“Ouch,” he muttered, daubing his eyes with his sleeve.

“Precisely,” she said with extreme satisfaction. “You won’t doubt again. Thank you for all you’ve done. But _why_ are you so bright? I’m so curious.”

“I’m more curious about what you’ve seen in Don, personally,” said Savigny. 

Solange’s smile vanished, the anger returning. She was still talking to Numair. “Donatien and Savigny are the stars I navigate by when my Sight is not narrowed,” she said to him. “But Don is dimming to me, even from all the way in Alaire Fief. Something eclipses him, and there are whispers …” She gestured in Savigny’s general direction, now, finding him standing close to her and tapping her fingers on his chest. “I had a warning from a very reliable source, Sav, about Don. I don’t recall the exact words used as it was rather difficult to fully understand through all the shouting. My messenger has a very loud voice, you must understand.”

“What was the warning?” rasped Savigny.

Solange was quiet, grim. Thoughtful, for a moment. Finally, she spoke.

“When the heart’s blood is shed, the Goddess hides her shame,” she said, shoulders taut, expression fixed. Numair felt sick; he knew a God-promise when he heard one, even muted through a mortal mouth. “Galla bleeds to the king’s scream. All is lost. All will drown. None but the dead shall follow. And she will see midnight.”

“Who?” said Numair into the silence that followed. Solange made a quizzical sound. “Which god?”

“What makes you think it’s a –”

But he wasn’t feeling coy.

“I know,” he said bluntly.

Solange quirked her mouth with some resignation. “It’s unimportant. The message isn’t his, anyway. I don’t quite think portents are his style. He was simply passing it along because it either suited him to, or a smarter sibling tricked him into it.”

That, thought Numair, sounded like Mithros. And if Mithros was meddling, they were in more trouble than he’d imagined. Incidentally, knowing Alanna as he did – the Hand of the Goddess – he was not excited to realise that Solange, for all her slender innocence especially next to Rainary, was evidently the chosen one of Mithros. 

“Assassination,” Savigny breathed.

“Ridiculous,” snapped Rainary, gripping the hilt of her sabre.

“Is that _exactly_ what was said?” Numair pressed, anxious. If he didn’t know which god had given the warning, he didn’t know if it was the kind of herald that was only useful with hindsight or if there was something to be done. 

“No,” said Solange. As though she saw the outraged stare Savigny shot her, she added an irate, “You try memorising some cryptic poetry when your ears are bleeding and your face feels like it’s peeling off. They don’t make it _easy_.”

Definitely Mithros, thought Numair glumly. They were doomed.

Solange turned her head and said, “Their meeting has ended. I wish to speak to my brother privately before you rile him, Savigny. Daine, take Savigny – and Constant – down to the stables. Cloud will be glad to see you. I will see Don and then summon you all.”

Daine looked thrown to have been ordered away so swiftly, and then whitened as she registered what was being asked of her. Savigny simply scowled. But they were given no time to argue. Solange fetched her cane and swept out, aligning herself against the plush chair she was by before moving. Rainary opened the door for her and almost took Constant out with it. The boy looked strained.

“Don’s gone up to his chambers,” he said to Solange, before spotting Savigny and freezing in place.

“Lovely. We can chat while petting the fish ferrets.” Solange walked through the doorway with no thought as to whether Constant would move out of her way or not. He did, of course, but Numair suspected mostly because Solange was a force of nature rather like a great wave or wind tunnel; if you didn’t get out of her way, she’d keep going without even noticing you’d been flung aside. And then she was gone and it was like a light had left with her, the room darker, less interesting. Rainary, after a glance at Savigny, went after her. Numair felt deflated.

Daine saw his expression.

“She has that effect on everyone,” she said, patting his hand. “Don’t worry. Falling in love with Solange is a national pastime.”

Constant diverted from Savigny’s glare and came to Numair.

“I requested to sit as my title allows and Don granted it,” he said bluntly, eyes sliding to Savigny as though he expected to be shouted at though his attention was, apparently, on Numair. “Can you seal the room?”

Numair warded the room and locked the doors.

Then he looked at his youngest student.

“Magisri Ossika has put forth a motion for all Gallan mages to be marked,” said Constant, expression gaunt. “She’s created a paint – she had Pech there and he looked unhappy, I think she made him help – that works as their old mage marks did, but this one seals to the skin of a mage instead of simply changing colour if magic is there.”

Daine, explaining for Savigny, who was silent, said, “To be employed in the palace guard, mage marking was a requirement. All it is is a thumbprint that glows red for mages and blue for all else. Those who it went blue for were allowed to wash it off, though any who showed red had to keep it on. I think some parts of the city guard were picking it up, but it hasn’t spread beyond that …”

Numair remembered the fair guards with the luminous red thumbprints upon their cheeks. All mages. They were the so-called Sniffers, he realised, of course they were mages. They were seeking magical activity using their own Gifts, in the employ of the Crown. Troubling.

“No colour changes?” asked Daine.

“Yeah,” said Constant, mouth curling down. “But this one changes colour if the mage uses magic and dulls when they don’t. I don’t like it. It feels … something is happening. _All_ mages? She says it’s needful because –”

“It will outcast them,” said Savigny. They all looked at him. His expression was haggard. “They’ll become easy targets for hate. There’ll be no hiding. The more hate they’re exposed to, the more likely they’ll retaliate. Once that cycle begins, there’ll be no stopping it.”

“Listen to me,” snapped Constant, voice cracking in a way that would have had Numair smiling had the boy not been so frightened. “I know it’s awful, and Don said no and so did two of the lords, but –”

“Don said _no_?” Savigny breathed, startled. Numair sidled over and elbowed him.

Constant continued, undeterred: “– Ossika says we must because magic needs to be stopped before it succeeds in killing Don.”

There was silence. Those words didn’t drop into the world easily; they exploded into it. Fundamentally changing the structure and shape of all. Numair, apart from his companions in their love for their king, saw it do so with devastating clarity on their faces.

Into that silence, Constant finished: “She said there’s no keeping it a secret anymore. Someone’s using magic to kill Don slowly, and her and Cole can’t find a way to stop it from happening even though they’re trying everything they can.”

Numair opened his mouth to speak, to say anything – to query Constant further, to find out where they stood – but Savigny burst back to life, striding past Numair and Constant and going for the door. He didn’t even wait for Numair to pull the wards aside; Numair felt a shove at them and he dulled them fast before Savigny’s Gift kicked at him. Savigny vanished from the room, the others having no time to do anything to stop him from going.

“Wait here,” Numair said to them both, sensing that Savigny was liable to lash out in his fear, and he’d already damaged his and Constant’s relationship enough. Nor did Numair want Daine, who was reeling from her own personal troubles, to come into contact with the harshest edge of Savigny’s loyalty. They obeyed, for whatever reason. 

Thus, he was alone as he strode after Savigny. Not running, because Numair disliked doing so, but it was close enough that the difference was barely definitional.

Savigny didn’t stop when Numair skidded up next to him. His expression was thunderous.

“No one told me,” he said without waiting for Numair to speak. As they moved at speed through the light halls of the palace, lined with more plants, more stained glass, more intricately shaped walls, guards kneeled for them; Numair did his best to ignore it. “How is this _not_ the business of the Gift?! Why would they hide this from me?”

“I don’t know,” Numair said. “But I urge you, don’t storm in there. Have you considered that if there are people plotting against the king, you not knowing of these plots is _very_ deliberate?”

Savigny’s stride faltered. Numair, seeing more guards ahead spot them and kneel in anticipation of their passing, wound yet another muffling spell around them, this one laced with idle conversation. The guards would hear them bickering about some matter of student learning. 

“Constant said Ossika only informed the lords of this plot now,” he said slowly. They passed the guards, moving up a flight of stairs into yet another wing. Numair was very lost by now. “That implies she, Cole, and I presume Don himself were the only ones who knew. Then they chose to exclude me. Or Don did, rather.”

Numair saw the hurt despite Savigny’s valiant attempt to hide it.

“What does Don have to gain from hiding a plot against him from you?” he said, mostly thinking out loud. “Whether you’ve fallen out or not, I doubt he wants to die. He’d be looking for any assistance.”

“But that leaves Ossika,” said Savigny, frowning. “I barely know her.”

This wing of the palace, Numair noted, was much less populated. All that occupied it were four guards walking ahead in the black and white surcoats of the king. They didn’t look back to see Numair and Savigny approaching. That was a relief. Numair hated the kneeling.

“Or Cole,” he reminded Savigny gently. “Savigny, stop. Look at me. Don’t look at them – they can’t hear us. Before you go in there, help me understand you.”

Savigny had stopped, but not happily. His shoulders were folded, his gaze anywhere but on Numair’s, his hands curled by his sides.

“Daine says your fear of the palace is to do with Cole,” said Numair.

“I don’t fear the palace,” said Savigny, a bite to his tone, “and what would _Daine_ know? She’s barely met the man. I ensured that.”

They both tensed as that slipped loose, Numair realising that Savigny hadn’t meant to say it. Normally, he’d have danced around hurting the other man, but he couldn’t now. A kingdom relied on him knowing more than he did, and knowing it now.

Numair, gently, said, “Why is that? Why protect Daine from a man who means no harm? Why protect Constant?”

“I don’t see why you’re bothering to ask,” Savigny snarled, wheeling on him. “You’ve obviously already made up your mind! Cole ruined my magic, you’ve decided, and you won’t be convinced otherwise. Cole is the centre of all evil! Savigny is just a sad, pitiful boy, too afraid of his teacher to speak out –”

“That’s not true,” said Numair. “I don’t think you’re pitiful at all. On the contrary, it’s truly brave that you were able to advocate for Daine’s safety even though no one ever advocated for yours. How old were you then?”

Savigny backed up, turning to flee. Numair followed. Neither ran. They just walked, Savigny fast and Numair slightly behind, rounding the corner. Two guards walking ahead were talking, stopping as they glanced over and saw the two men. But Numair’s focus was on Savigny, though he noted that it was the guards from before, minus their companions. The guards pulled back against the wall as they approached.

“They didn’t understand Daine,” said Savigny. Numair stayed quiet. “When we found her, I mean. They brought her here and … caged her. We hated that, Don and I, though Don the most. He threatened unholy things if she wasn’t released. Finally, the queen agreed, under the condition that Daine was placed under the crown’s guardianship until she could be better understood. Don was pleased by this. I knew it meant Cole.”

Numair thought back to how old Daine had been when she’d come to them.

“You were fifteen?” he asked.

“Somewhere around there, yes. Younger, perhaps.”

Numair said, “Then you were living with Cole, no? She would have stayed with you.”

Savigny was silent, expression unfathomable.

Finally, he said, “That was untenable. She was hurt. Her family’s death, her isolation, her magic, and after being caged … it would have smothered her. I petitioned to have her sent to my parents. Eventually, they agreed, though only if Father worked with Cole to ensure her magic could no longer harm anyone. That’s when they began to bind her. But it was kinder than the alternative.”

“The alternative,” said Numair, “being Cole.”

“He is excellent with children,” said Savigny stiffly. “He has never raised a hand to a child, never raised his voice in anger. He never struck, shouted, or denigrated me or any other. He keeps dogs of the type that children love, and he is generous with them. There is not a person in this castle who can find fault with his kindness. I wanted for nothing under his care. No material goods, no physical affection, no kind word. Your judgement offends me.”

“Savigny,” said Numair, touching his arm.

“He is _not_ part of a plot against Don,” Savigny hissed, eyes locked on the guards as though unsure Numair’s magic would hide his words. The guards watched him back, expressions carefully blank. “There wasn’t a meeting between him and Don when we were children that he didn’t have a sweet for him or a kind word. He _loves_ Don. He has told him so. He has told me so. He prides in us as though we were his sons.”

“Savig –”

“He loves _us_ ,” Savigny spat, yanking his arm out of reach. “It’s Ossika. It must be. She poisons his mind, perhaps. Or he doesn’t know. He’s not here, is he?”

He was looking at the guards again.

“Very well,” said Numair, retreating. He sensed they were approaching a breaking point, and it wasn’t one they should reach in public if he wished to retain Savigny’s respect after. “I hear what you’re saying. It’s not my place to put judgement on a man I haven’t met –”

Savigny, interrupting, said to the guards, “Why aren’t you kneeling?”

Numair was, for a moment, affronted. He couldn’t help the unpleasant look he knew was on his face. Demanding zealotry was never attractive, and he was startled. He hadn’t thought Savigny the type to desire it, even if it was given to him. Perhaps he’d misjudged more than just Cole –

Then he realised Savigny’s hand was on the hilt of his rapier.

The guards, startled, bowed. It was the depth correct for a lord. It was not how Numair had seen Savigny be greeted until now.

“Apologies, sir,” said one of the guards, offering a smile as he straightened. “We didn’t realise who you were and hope no offence was taken.”

“You don’t know who I am,” said Savigny, taking a step back. It was not a defensive step back. It put him in front of Numair, and altered his stance from tense to light, waiting, ready. “Who are you?”

It happened so fast. One of the guards went to speak – and the other whipped their hand out, a knife appearing in a flash of silver as she threw it with devastating accuracy at Savigny. There wasn’t even time to shout, though Numair opened his mouth to –

Savigny’s rapier moved with astounding speed as he side-stepped and used the thin blade to knock the throwing knife aside – and then he lunged. 

They didn’t stand a chance.

Numair didn’t wholly appreciate swordplay as much as, say, Alanna. He recognised excellence, but he saw no inherent beauty in people poking holes in each other. If needs must, he preferred the simplicity of a staff. There was nothing subtle or confusing about striking people with large lengths of wood until they ceased to do whatever was causing him to hit them.

Savigny didn’t fight like Alanna, or Raoul, or even George, who Numair had seen in action once and envied for his speed and grace with a pair of short daggers. Savigny fought as though his opponent had asked him to dance, accepting that dance with the lightweight blade he used as an extension of his body. Numair suspected, watching the way Savigny used speed in place of a solid defence, his feet never still and the blade never reckless, that Alanna would abhor the way Savigny fought. A single solid blow would knock him down and it was flashier than it needed to be. But it was so _quick_ that Numair doubted many opponents had ever managed to land that blow. 

It took the space of Numair taking five steps back to get out of the way for Savigny to disarm one guard and cripple the other. The disarmed one saw his companion collapse, arm slashed in the exact part that meant the muscles would never heal properly, and he ran. 

With all the coiled anger of a snake, Savigny hurled himself after the guard and gently swept his blade at the fleeing man’s legs. It had all the elegance of a caress. It cut the tendons like butter.

They only began to scream once they were already beaten; there simply wasn’t time for the pain to register before that.

“Assassins,” said Savigny calmly, turning half-way to face Numair. “There were four, weren’t there?”

“Yes,” Numair confirmed.

Savigny ran, Numair assumed, for his king.

Numair made it to the king’s chambers far after Savigny, who he hadn’t a hope of outrunning or even merely catching up to. He suspected that the man had been taught to run by a racehorse, or one of the lean lurcher hounds bred for speed. It was barely human.

He found the king’s chambers in disarray, but not as much as he’d feared. Solange was crouched by Rainary, who’d been hit with one of the assassin’s Gifts within seconds of them entering – they’d known to target her, Numair noted – and gone down hard under it. The king had retreated two rooms back, Numair finding them in a room built to contain a garden. Donatien was bloodied, holding a sword of his own. One of the assassins was already dead, Numair suspected by Donatien. The body was half in the indoor pond, otters chittering abuse at it from the safety of the greenery.

Savigny fought the other one. This one wasn’t going down easily, Numair realised; she’d seen her death coming at her when Savigny had burst into the room and had turned on him with all the fire of a creature at the end of its life. He was already bleeding from a strike across his thigh, her own sword an iota slower than his. But a thigh cut, for him, was devastating; if he didn’t have his speed, his technique left him too open.

Numair readied himself to step in, his Gift surging –

– and Donatien was there beside Savigny, falling into step as though this was not just _a_ dance, as Numair had thought it was, but _their_ dance. With him there, every opening Numair’s untrained eye had spotted in Savigny’s attack was closed. Donatien was the strength that Savigny was missing, his slower sword a devastating danger when it was coupled with the lashing of Savigny’s. No blow would fell Savigny because, to reach him, it had to get past Don’s defences. The assassin was driven backwards, towards the great balcony.

“Are there others?” Donatien asked Savigny as they circled their prey. 

“Alive, yes,” said Savigny, his eyes never leaving the assassin, who was beginning to look frantic. She lifted her sleeve to her mouth – and Savigny’s sword kissed her wrist. The sleeve was cut away, something small falling with it to land soundlessly upon the grass.

No doubt, Numair knew, a killing pill.

“Mercy,” whispered the assassin, dropping her weapon and hugging her cut wrist to her chest.

Donatien looked at Savigny’s thigh, the expression on his gaunt face hateful. 

_He gets stupid when the people he loves are hurt,_ Numair remembered Daine saying. _Blood makes him panicky._

“Then we don’t need this one,” said Donatien, as resolute as a glacier. 

Savigny, with the barest inclination of his head, said, “As you wish, prince,” and struck.


	22. A Tale of Two Spies

They were a garish sight, Savigny with his boots and pants off and still bleeding; Numair kneeled like a lover engaged in the least sensual activity one could do so close to their partner’s genitals. Savigny was seated on the disused bed of another room within the king’s chambers, one that Numair suspected had been set aside for Savigny’s use years ago. Numair was crouched between his legs, needle in one hand and alcohol in the other.

“Why didn’t you stop me?” asked Savigny. Numair didn’t answer until the bare skin he was working on had been liberally wet with the alcohol and the bottle set aside. He was saving his answer for the first punch of the needle through skin. Distraction would be kinder then.

He said, as the needle bit down, “I believed you wouldn’t kill her.”

This did not appear to be the desired answer. Savigny, his fingers bunched tight in the sheet below him, toes curled into the carpet and his skin painted red, tensed into the pain and grunted. Numair, ignoring this, tied off the stitch and began to work faster now the initial breach had been made.

“How could you?” said Savigny finally. He was trembling. “You don’t know me.”

Numair couldn’t pause in his work to engage as fully in this conversation as he suspected Savigny needed him to. The faster this wound was closed, the cleaner it would heal; he knew that Savigny would be devastated by a limp. It was infuriating that he couldn’t have it healed magically to be sure the muscles and tendons were unharmed. A small part of him was considering George’s healer located at the Lady Eloise’s estates …

Despite his distraction, he did answer.

“You place your morals before your duty,” he said, vision snap-focused on the wound he was closing. Three stitches done. “If Donatien asks you to jump, you don’t ask him how many peasants you must step on to reach the desired height. You challenge him. You ask if jumping is really needed when it only benefits some. Cutting down a woman begging for mercy –”

“An assassin.”

“– a _human_ , just because Donatien requested it in a moment of panic … I believed you wouldn’t. And you didn’t, so I was right, which is honestly the most important part. She’s awaiting justice in a cell, as is appropriate.”

Savigny, again, said, “But you didn’t know _._ ”

Numair finished the stitches without answering, the silence so leaden between them a talented blacksmith could probably have made a fine sword from it. When he was done, he cleaned the wound and bandaged it. Then he slid onto the bed beside Savigny, ensured the door was locked, and took the other man’s hand. Savigny was staring at the bandage. He looked unwell. Blood loss dizziness was likely since there was enough on the sheets and trailed between here and the other room where the physician was seeing Donatien that Numair knew he’d be feeling the deficit.

“I need my belief in people,” said Numair, taking a moment in the madness to be soft and calm. He leaned against Savigny, feeling the other man accept the invitation and release his tension. Numair held him as his trembling slowed, the adrenaline of the near miss fading. He kept speaking, though he knew soon Savigny would be angling to get back to his king: “It’s what keeps me able to go on when things become insurmountable, when it feels I’m losing myself. It’s a kind of strength. Constant has it too, you know. I think he could take any number of blows in his life so long as he still believes in the kindness and love of the people he’s surrounded by.”

“I don’t believe in people,” Savigny said, his voice dulled by his fatigue. “No one is wholly trustworthy.”

“Constant?” asked Numair.

“A ch …” Savigny began, before slowing. Numair could see how the man struggled to redefine his young brother into the adult that he very nearly was and it both frustrated and saddened him. The longer this struggle of Savigny’s continued, the deeper the divide between him and his sibling – and Numair knew that any number of powers could act upon that division. “Not a child, no, but not in a position where I would burden him. Undue belief beyond his abilities would harm him.”

“Daine,” said Numair.

Savigny was already shaking his head. “Carrying her own burdens. She cannot carry mine.”

Donatien was obviously out, as were Savigny’s parents even if they’d been alive. He didn’t seem close to Rainary or her sister, Nora. Numair pondered.

Savigny with devastating simplicity said, “I trusted Cole.”

“Solange?” Numair tried, moving as far away from the topic of Cole as it was possible to go without physically leaving the country. 

“Her mother’s daughter,” said Savigny in a dry tone. “I trust her as I trust Don.”

Numair assumed that meant ‘carefully, and with an escape route.’

“You know,” he said, words as soft as the kiss he left behind upon Savigny’s hair, “you can believe in me.”

Fast and cruel, Savigny retorted with, “And what does that belief entail? A man who doesn’t tell me where he comes from or where he intends to go once his baffling business is finished with? Does it encompass Numair the kind-hearted mage who makes me feel a worse person in comparison to his absurd goodness?”

Flattered, Numair preened.

Savigny wasn’t done.

“Or does it mean I also must believe in Numair Salmalín, the Tortallan King’s court mage and close companion of the Lioness? The man who must be a spy for his country because no other explanation as to why he cares _so_ much about the devastated lives of four orphaned fools makes any sense except if he’s somehow as brilliant and gentle and –” Savigny inhaled fiercely, pulling out of Numair’s grip and leaping up. He limped away, his tilted gait clawing at Numair’s heart. He wanted to see Savigny _dance_ , not stagger. “I do _not_ believe in a man so good. No one else in my life has offered me such simple affection as you, not without their own demands. So, what are yours, Salmalín? Are you an outlier or a spy?”

“I have no demands,” Numair said, his eyes never leaving Savigny’s. “Not of you. And I am not a spy, but I do report to my king.”

There was that quiet again. It had bladed itself in its absence. No blacksmith needed.

Despite still being without pants, Savigny’s stance had turned dangerous. Numair had no doubt one misstep here would have the man’s Gift used against him. Four assassins had already been faced in this palace today; Savigny was keyed too high to not be afraid of being the source of another.

“Explain the difference,” said Savigny. His tone was that of the Savigny of months prior, when Numair had been ill. The same man who’d knitted at Numair’s bedside with a sword at his side.

“I will,” said Numair, gesturing to the bed beside him, “but, please, Savigny – sit down. Pacing will strain your leg. The stitches won’t hold. Please.”

The sword made of everything they hadn’t said to each other, all of their sharpened secrets, hung over them, fully realised, casually honed, perfect in its ability to deliver ruin. The danger was true. But Savigny disarmed it; he nodded and, his limp worse, slunk back to the bed. There was a bare handspan of space between them. It felt as impassable as the palace walls when their gates were closed.

Numair, after a shaken breath, began to speak.

“My history prior to Tortall is of little relevance to my being here,” he said, knowing his voice was wavering, “but I will mention it anyway. I was born in Tyra. I am an exile from Carthak where I was trained in the great university as a Black Robe mage.”

Savigny’s inhale, so soon to the beginning of Numair’s story, did not bode well. But he didn’t interrupt. Numair locked his gaze onto his knees, ignored Savigny reaching for his clothes beside him to begin to dress, and continued.

“After my exile, I came to Tortall. I am … I cannot understate my loyalty to Tortall and my king. They gave me everything I had lost – a home, my health, my self-respect. Everything I am now, they crafted it from nothing and gifted it to me. I arrived penniless upon their doorstep. They could have had me executed as a spy. They could have sent me back to Carthak in chains, to the same end. They could have done nothing and I would have starved. They did not. They helped me. Their kindness is the reason I am sitting here now, and why I call them my family.”

Savigny said, “I would make you as rich as any of your Tortallan nobles. When this silliness is done, our court will crave a black jewel to set it apart from the rest, to help us be strong as we recover. You could stay.”

Numair grieved that handspan of distance even as he replied, “I am Tortallan.”

It was all he needed to say. He would never be another king’s pet.

“I see,” said Savigny. “Continue.”

“I am not a spy,” said Numair. “I am an academic. Occasionally, when needs must, certain persons within Tortall are used in covert roles that suit their unique abilities. They are not on the spymaster’s payroll, nor would they confess to being spies if questioned, but often those roles include information gathering of a clandestine manner. Mine is a recognisable face. I am never used as an undercover operative, nor am I trained to be so. My abilities lie in my Gift and my intelligence, which was the purpose for which I was assigned before you found me as the hawk.”

“Spying on Donatien,” said Savigny. Numair didn’t look at him. He was too busy examining his very interesting knees, his skin unpleasantly heated as though he was in the middle of a fight instead of a calm conversation. Anticipating confrontation. 

“No. I was gathering information on a Tortallan lord suspected of treason, in the fief bordering the Gallan border. My hawk form is a matter of state secrecy – it was that form that King Jonathan was utilising. However, I was … clumsy. I was caught and subject to some time at the lord’s pleasure.”

“Torture,” said Savigny. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” admitted Numair, shuddering. “He administered large amounts of sedatives, which caused the state you found me in when I escaped. I flew to Galla quite by mistake, maddened by the drugs and out of my mind. But, before that, I discovered that the lord is working with Carthak to weaken the Gallan-Tortallan border against Carthakian incursions.”

Savigny inhaled again, shorter this time. “Ludicrous. Carthak is in no position to fight through us to get to Tortall, and that’s even assuming they have passage through Maren. Otherwise they’re blunting their teeth on Maren, and then us, and _then_ Tortall.”

“But if Maren allows them passage through, which is likely considering their unique status as the sole slave-runners on the continent,” Numair explained, still unable to look Savigny in the eyes, “and then they come to Galla to find its armies in ruins, its borders unguarded as it devours itself in a civil war invoked by the death of a contentious king with no clear heir … and then they sweep through Galla and into Tortall through a treasonous border fief?”

“Merciful Goddess,” breathed Savigny. He’d gone so still Numair didn’t even think he was breathing anymore. “They’d claim both our nations in one fell hit. How could you keep this information from me?!”

“It is mostly suspicion at this point,” admitted Numair, closing his eyes and tightening his hands on his thighs. He couldn’t bear the distance. “Nothing certain, though the more I see the less uncertain I am. I assure you, I was never an agent against Galla. If anything, my king desires me and mine become useful to you in defending against an outside threat. There is not a single Tortallan who would see Galla fall.”

“Then you have other agents here,” said Savigny.

“Yes.”

They sat in a digestive silence, Numair feeling as chewed up as he’d ever been without physical activity. There was still, he noted when he opened his eyes, blood on his fingers. Savigny’s blood.

“Why didn’t you trust the court physician to see to your wound?” he asked mostly out of a desire to break the silence before it became acidic.

“The court physician is Ossika,” replied Savigny, distracted. “At this current point, I am even less unquestioning of her than usual. You didn’t intend to come to Galla? This was all by chance?”

Numair tested his belief in people more than he ever had before. If he was wrong, he’d pay the price. But it was time to know.

Secrecy had had too long damaging these people.

“I think,” he said, “that perhaps Daine should be here for the next part. It concerns her.”

“I agree,” said Savigny after a moment, though he added an uncomfortable, “so long as you understand that she can be easily distraught. It would be devastating to her if the news you carry is destabilising. I expect you understand. For all that you’re exactly as I expected … I don’t think you mean us harm, do you?”

“Never,” said Numair, honestly. “I’m here because I was swept here chasing enemies that we share. I stayed because I care for you and yours. I would help you, if you’ll allow it.”

Finally, Numair looked at Savigny, who was watching him with his wolf green eyes so much softer than Numair had expected they would be considering that this must be a betrayal, hearing it from his lips. But, he was curious.

“You must have known at least some of this,” he said. “You knew my name.”

“Of course I did. You said so yourself, you have a recognisable face.”

Numair grimaced. “But not immediately?” Savigny shook his head. “Then it was the mage, Nonny, who told you who I am. You know them. They recognised me immediately and, so far as I know, they’re the only one who did. I’ve seen them with Constant too, in disguise. Illusioned in the same manner as your spotted horse, with the same style of magic.”

This pushed Savigny back onto his feet, sloping his way across the room with his hand settled upon the damaged thigh. Numair hated it, but he let him pace. If they made it through this intact, he’d be in a position to have Savigny healed. If they didn’t, well. 

Then, he turned on Numair.

“A secret for a secret,” he said, shoulders firm and expression terse. Numair stilled. He waited. It came. “My father was the Gallan spymaster, which you must know already. He was known as being so, as the Hartholms are known. Gallan spies are colloquially ravens, hence why we were given the standard. I also suspect this is why Raven mocks us, by using our namesake.”

“A sly move,” said Numair, nodding. “I knew. I met your father once, when I was small. I presumed his network died with him, given the … style of his death.”

Savigny said, “It did. Whatever the Queen kept together, which I must guess was some, collapsed further with her passing. In the time since Father, in between my duties to Donatien, I have sought to reassemble what I can and recreate the rest, working from what few records my father kept that Don and I have been able to access.”

Numair wasn’t overly surprised. It wasn’t even the worst information he could have had confirmed. In fact, it could prove to be supremely beneficial.

“Then you’re the Gallan spymaster,” he confirmed, Savigny offering a wry grin.

“Behold, my glory,” he said, gesturing to himself. “Here I am, minus several pints of blood and without anywhere near the network my father built for himself. Spies are very good at hiding during hostile takeovers, which is what they sensed was coming with my parents’ deaths.”

“And Nonny?” was Numair’s next question.

Savigny grimaced.

“Not mine,” he said after a long, untenable silence. “Power rushes to fill voids, and my father’s death left many voids indeed. Nonsense is one of Raven’s. Raven … is an unreliable, unrepentant ally.”

He looked away, avoiding Numair’s gaze.

“I have no doubt she’ll work to recruit you,” said Savigny to the wall, Numair bemused by his sudden unease. “You could do worse than to let her, as she is far better aligned to assist you in your work than I am. I’m hampered by my isolation from my father’s work and my need to fill in the gaps of my understanding by walking backwards in a dead man’s footsteps. I was never intended to fill these shoes. They pinch.”

“You said you’re in danger from her,” said Numair cautiously, standing and approaching Savigny. “If we’re being honest with each other, this feels an important place to be so. I can’t protect you from dangers you don’t warn me are approaching. _Please,_ stop leaning on that leg.”

Savigny rolled his eyes, but he let Numair take his weight on the bad side and lead him back to the bed with only one desperate stare back to the door. Numair knew he was thinking of Donatien. This time, Savigny sat and Numair paced.

“She’s consuming,” said Savigny, watching Numair pace. “That’s all. It’s not a danger you need worry about since it is unique to my complicated relationship with her. She’s a rebel mage at the spearhead of a gaggle of enraged mages all aimed clumsily in the direction of my king. There was never a chance my relationship with her would be anything _but_ complicated, considering that her aims are anathema to my own.”

“Then your relationship with her is complex solely from oppositional aims?” Numair asked, doubting it. “Not because of personal conflict?”

Savigny laughed. “Do you think I’m in love with her, Numair?”

Numair said nothing.

“Interesting,” said Savigny, eyebrows raised. “No, I’m not in love with her. I envy her. She is free in a way that I am not, respected by her people in ways I wish I could be respected by mine … I am the one thing she is not.”

“Which is?” asked Numair.

With misery, with heartbroken surety, with absolute confidence, Savigny said, “A failure. As a brother, a son, a Gift, a lover, a mage, I am a failure. Were it that Raven was born a Hartholm in my place, none of this would have happened.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Numair said.

Another laugh. 

A careless shrug.

He was, Numair realised, bleeding through his bandages. The stitches must have torn.

“Then, darling,” said Savigny, idly using Don’s affected air and looking down to watch the red seep through the fabric of his breeches, “you’re not paying enough attention.” 

To Numair’s utter shock, when he was sent to fetch Daine into the room – Savigny instructing him to tell anyone who asked to mind their own business, which Numair suspected was a good show of Savigny’s inability to be political when he was in pain – he was also told to collect Constant.

“If you’re to be involved in his life, he should know what’s behind you,” was the only reason Savigny gave, though Numair also suspected that Savigny was trying to make amends in his own way. Evidently, his admittance that he was too proud to easily apologise was very accurate. He appeared to be trying to apologise in every way but with his words.

Nevertheless, Numair collected Constant from where he was lingering anxiously outside the bay where Rain was being seen by the student physicians underneath Ossika. Numair had to go in to fetch Daine. She was refusing to be moved from Rain’s bedside. He took the opportunity to touch Rain’s hand and, while the physicians were distracted by Constant’s metal hawk screaming in bird by the windows, pulled the foul Gift the assassins had left inside her out. For lack of anything to do with it, he kept the ball of unpleasant magic in his hand as they left to return to the king’s chambers. The palace was in disarray as the news of the assassins spread, but Daine and Constant were recognised; they weren’t challenged.

“Is that what was hurting Rain?” Constant asked, warily eyeing Numair’s hand. Numair was keeping it in his pocket to avoid any guards seeing, but Constant had caused the distraction deliberately. He knew Numair had done something.

“Mmm,” said Numair, thinking. “I’ll have to store it somewhere and examine it later, to ensure there’s nothing nasty and long term built in. But she should be fine now with some rest.”

“Store how?” asked Daine from where she’d been trudging glumly beside him. With the news that Rain would be okay, she’d perked up. “In a bottle?”

“Perhaps. Anything that can be used as magical conduit could work too, glassware, pots –”

“Stones?” asked Constant. He trotted to catch up, struggling under the weight of the glove on his arm which held Pippy. The metal nightmare creature was elsewhere, probably devouring something it shouldn’t. Numair nodded, accidentally making eye contact with Pippy and causing her to ruffle up as she considered it a challenge to her eagle supremacy.

“Daine, tell the bird I don’t want to fight her,” he said uneasily, looking away. “Can’t she go outside? Constant’s arm looks like it’s going to fall off.”

Daine looked at the eagle. The eagle looked back. There was a focused silence between them.

“I have a stone,” said Constant conversationally as Daine talked to the eagle. “Does it have to be a particular kind of stone?”

“Jewels are better than rock, some jewels are better than others, mage-worked ones are best,” Numair rattled off. Pippy wasn’t moving. He wondered how fish-ferrets liked sea eagles. On that thought, “Daine, when we’re finished talking to Savigny, if you’re in the mindset for it, I think we should talk to the otters and the cat that Don keeps in his chambers. If he’s acting erratically, they might be able to give us some clue why.”

“If you’d stop being so weird and pokey about what you’re going to tell us, sure,” said Daine, looking away from Pippy to stare at Numair. “Is this about the assassins? Or Sav? Is he hurt worse than you said?”

Constant’s eyes widened.

“No,” said Numair, only realising after he said it that it may be inaccurate. “Well, potentially. But I have a plan for that. No, I have … something else. An admission.”

Constant and Daine looked at each other.

“Are we warded?” asked Daine in a whisper, eyeing some passing servants.

“Yes, of course,” answered Numair, rather put out that she doubted him. “Constant, show me the stone.”

“I don’t think I should get it out in the hallway,” said Constant at the exact same time Daine cheerfully remarked, “Is this where you tell us you’re a spy?”

Numair almost tripped over his own feet.

“Looks like it,” said Constant. “That’s not news. We knew that. Daine guessed it while you were sleeping ages ago. She said you slept like you had secrets. We just didn’t tell Sav because we agreed he’s very delicate and can get over-excited about these things.”

Numair looked at Daine, who shrugged.

“You have a very enigmatic snore,” she said. 

Numair mouthed ‘enigmatic’, bewildered by these people. 

“I’m not a spy,” he said for a lack of anything else to say. They began to walk again.

“Oh no,” said Daine. “Of course not. Of course, if you _were_ a spy, you’d have to say that.”

“Yeah,” Constant said, “that’s how spying works. But it’s okay. We definitely believe you.”

Pippy squalled.

“She said no, by the way,” said Daine of the eagle, nodding at her. “And if you tell her to go outside like a puppy again, she’s going to bite your beak. I think she means your nose.”

Numair glared at the bird. “I think she knows exactly what she means,” he muttered.

They travelled the rest of the way in a stony, beaky silence.

Savigny was exactly where Numair had left him, which was unsurprising as he was currently having what Numair would refer to as a tragic time. His pacing had torn the skin around the stitches, which didn’t bode well for restitching them. Numair was calm. He’d find a healer, he determined. The only addition to the room was an elderly cat, which was curled on Savigny’s arm from where he was stretched on the bed, petting it.

“You walked on it,” accused Numair, spotting blood on Savigny’s bare foot that was spotted in the manner of having dripped from above in motion, not from pooling down a leg. “Savigny!”

“I had to check on Don,” said Savigny. He rearranged himself and the cat as Daine moved over to examine his leg. They’d had to re-remove his breeches as the limb had begun to swell. Numair watched her set the back of her hand against his skin, frowning at the heat. “They wouldn’t allow me entry. How _dare_ they.”

“Constant, the stone,” Numair asked, watching Daine unwrap the bandages. He wished he’d asked Ossika for the weapon that had slashed Savigny, as poison was on his mind. While he was thinking, in the hand not holding the noxious Gift, a smooth object was placed. 

As soon as it touched Numair’s skin, all thoughts of poison faded.

Numair lifted his hand to find a fire opal glittering malevolently in his palm. He stared at it, then at Constant, who was looking at the stone with all his usual eager innocence. In Numair’s hand, the stone brooded. It was ill with someone’s fouled Gift. Numair felt sickened holding it.

He closed his fingers around it fast before it caught his mind with its snarling grip.

Distantly, he could hear Savigny continuing to complain that he hadn’t been allowed to see Don. He could see Daine redoing the bandages. He heard Constant’s voice once again querying what they were there for. And he heard his own voice, hoarse even to his own ears, asking, “Where did you find this stone?”

Five heads swivelled to look at him. Constant was slower to reply than Daine, mostly because he was trying to tell Savigny about Rain and his stories often had all the momentum of a battle horse once they’d built up speed. It was Daine who spoke first.

“El says that’s from Don’s bedroom,” she said of the stone, glancing at the cat. “She says the other cats hate them. There’s more than one set into the fireplace, and they all give bad dreams.”

Savigny struggled up against the pillows, looking greyer now than he had before. They’d probably have to strap him to a horse to get out of here and, as Numair’s fingers ached around the tight grip they had on the stone, he knew they _were_ getting out of here.

“Daine, empty that glass bottle,” he said of a bottle of perfume that was thick with dust on a dresser. Daine did so. It didn’t need to be clean, just empty, and it was the work of a moment once it was so for Numair to seal the Gift he’d taken from Rain into it for later consideration. That done, he switched his attention to the far more alarming item: the fire opal.

“Don’t look at this for too long,” he warned them, though he did note that Constant seemed vastly unaffected. “I’m going to show you this stone, and I want to know if you’ve seen anything like it before. But only glance at it.”

“This isn’t what we asked them here to –” began Savigny. 

Numair opened his palm and showed them the stone. He counted to five. And he closed his fingers around it and tucked it out of sight, watching them carefully. El, the cat, spat at it. Pippy ruffled her feathers and hissed. Constant didn’t seem at all bothered, having sat himself up on the dresser so he could draw in the dust with one finger as they talked. He shrugged when Numair looked at him, as did Daine. Though, he noted, she was blinking fast, her eyes watering. 

Savigny, though. He’d stopped when Numair had revealed the opal and was now sitting dumb, as though he’d completely lost his train of thought. His eyes lingered where the stone had been and, Numair noted with a sharp spark of alarm, his expression was vaguely detached.

“Savigny,” he barked, the man jolting back to life with an irate stare.

“– talk about,” he belatedly finished, all of them staring at him. “What?”

“Have you seen that stone before?” Constant asked his brother, tone curious.

Savigny, however, just looked annoyed. “What stone? Numair, can we hurry up, please? I wish to be with Don. Tell them what you need to.”

“Fire opals are powerful magical devices,” Numair said grimly. “They can store magic, sharpen Gifts, be used in all manners of spellcasting, and – in the wrong hands – they can be extremely effective as what’s known as a fascinator. Most jewelled stones or even glass baubles can be used so, but fire opals are particularly pernicious.” At Daine and Constant’s blank stares, he explained, “Pervasive, subtly harmful. Destructively ruinous. A skilled mage can, with just a piece of sparkle, trap the mind of the unwary and bid them to do things against their will.”

“The effects are short lasting and limited,” said Savigny with scorn, levered up on one elbow. His curls were stuck to his forehead with the sweat that lightly beaded it. Numair wondered how close to Don he’d actually gotten, and if the man who supposedly cared so much for him had seen the state he was in. But he knew better than to argue that they should leave this conversation off; Savigny was determined it would occur now. “There are few mages who can will someone to do something they don’t wish to do, if it’s sorely against their morals. The fascinator can’t hold under the conflict.”

“There are multiple opals in Don’s room,” said Constant, looking horrified. “Can mages _really_ do that? That’s horrible …”

“The effect doesn’t multiply with more fascinators,” Savigny remarked, still unconcerned. “A mage can’t focus their will through more than one at once, anyway, and multiple mages just tangle the influence. This is basic theory, Numair. I’d have thought a black robe would know this.”

“The more often someone has been influenced by the fascinator, the more effect it has on them,” said Numair. “Scrolls came to Carthak from the university in Maren when I was a student, of studies there undergone on slaves. The younger the child when first exposed, the stronger the mage’s hold on them, especially as that child aged into the influence and if the pressure was kept simple. With that influence, the mage wouldn’t need to be constantly focused on the influence, and multiple stones _may_ compound the cumulative effect.”

Savigny was shaking his head. “What mage had access to Don so young, except my parents? I know you’re thinking Cole, but Don was rarely in his company and never alone. There simply wouldn’t have been the opportunity.”

“He’s not talking about Don,” said Daine with dreadful softness. “When you saw that bit of pretty, you went somewhere in your head. And you have no idea where, do you?”

Savigny, ashen, withdrew into the bedcovers, eyes flickering from Danie to Numair.

“Irrelevant,” he said, voice disconsolate but expression firm. “We’ll deal with that later. I’m in no position to be influenced by fire opals, and my point stands that I cannot be made to do anything that I would find repugnant, no matter how long-standing the exposure. I have no doubt thoroughly unpleasant spells can be laid into them. They’ll have to be removed from Don’s chambers, and the source of them found immediately. They’re certainly responsible for some of the illness he’s undergoing, though I can’t imagine why Co –” He stopped, grimaced, and for a moment was silent. Numair waited. Savigny was too smart to keep leaning into his denial, no matter how comfortable it was. “I will … speak to Donatien. About, about … Cole. I will speak to him about Cole. I’m …” He closed his eyes, sweat beading. “I think there may have been something on that sword, _damn_ Ossika. She told me it was clean. She must have known.”

Daine looked outraged, leaning back to feel around that wound. “That _bitch_ ,” she snapped. “Numair, can’t we get him out of here? I don’t trust here.”

Savigny was shaking his head. “Now,” he gritted out through tightened teeth, though Numair – alarmed – moved towards him to have his own look at the wound. “Tell them now. I’m not moving until then.” With a shudder, he added a vaguely disconnected, “Why would opals give cats bad dreams? Fascinators only work on humans.”

“It didn’t work at all on me,” Constant offered.

“Tell them _now_ ,” snarled Savigny.

Numair, very, very uneasy about Savigny’s sudden deterioration, didn’t argue. “I’m here at a god’s behest,” he said hurriedly, Daine blinking and Constant looking astounded, “waylaid from my work for the Tortallan king over the border. The Badger God appeared to me in a true dream, beseeching me to find a girl he’d misplaced.”

“A girl badger?” asked Constant, rather sensibly assuming.

“No,” Savigny bit out. He was breathing quite quickly. Daine was looking from him to the door, as though contemplating bolting for help. Numair slid his fingers back into his pocket, fumbling the opal and wondering if it was affecting Savigny. He’d been fine until Numair had brought it into the room … “He said it was about you, Daine.”

“No,” whispered Daine.

Numair gestured Constant over. Savigny’s eyes were shut and he didn’t open them as Constant slid from the dresser. Numair slipped the stone from his pocket to Constant’s and pointed to the door. Constant fled, closing the door as quietly as possible behind him.

“I’m afraid so,” Numair said to cover the sound of Constant’s exit, watching Savigny as closely as Daine was, despite her terror. “It’s you he’s looking for, Daine. He said your da sent him to keep an eye on you, but when he checked back you were gone. He’s tried to appear to you but you simply don’t seem to see him.”

Savigny’s breathing was evening out, some colour returning to what had become a ghastly shade of his usual colour. As Numair and Daine watched, he went abruptly limp, unconscious. Daine gasped, going for him, but Numair got there first.

The pulse in his throat was fast, slowing as Numair counted it.

“I’ve never known a fascinator to have such a physical effect upon someone,” Numair said to Daine without thinking, “but it was definitely the stone that caused that collapse. I need to see Donatien when he’s exposed to them.”

“Tell me you lied,” she demanded, ignoring him as one hand held Savigny’s limp fingers, her burning eyes locked on Numair. She looked bleak. “No animal god came looking for me, and my da is _no one_. No one who fusses with gods or monsters or, or, whatever that thing you saw was. It’s not _true_.”

“Daine, I would never lie about a god,” he said gently. “But the badger didn’t mean you any harm. On the contrary, the rare few times he _has_ appeared, he’s been nothing but stern with me about how best to help you.”

With his magic, he was trying to ascertain what had happened within Savigny. It wasn’t a nice realisation to find that there was a drug in his system of some form. A soporific, Numair suspected, leaning close and listening to the shallow breaths Savigny was taking. He checked his nails, seeing the faint blue tinge to them that indicated a reduction in his respiration. The sword must have been coated, which meant Ossika had lied and they’d lost valuable time to figure out what to give him to reverse it. Then Numair had brought a spelled item into the room which had caused the increased heart rate in Savigny, moving the drug through him faster. It was likely that, without that response, the drug would have lost efficacy before reaching the rest of his system. Numair had unwittingly assisted the assassin.

He swore, gently.

“Do you still trust me?” he asked Daine, desperate.

She said, under her breath but no less daringly for that, “No. How could I? You’re here to force me to use it, aren’t you?”

“I will never force you,” he pleaded, but he knew from her eyes she wasn’t going to meet him midway on this. Her past had hurt her too much, filled with those who would cage and beat her for her magic, who would use and abuse her. Those who saw her as nothing but a curiosity; those who would never allow her freedom if they knew a god had had any hand with her abilities. “Will you at least trust me to help you with him now?”

The stare she gave him was sour, scornful.

“If you have to ask you truly don’t know me at all, Master Salmalín,” she said, shocking him with the affected snap to her accent she gave, going from Daine to a stranger in a heartbeat. She said the words with a noble’s pronunciation, losing all the soft commonality that he loved so much about how she spoke. It was the first time he’d really appreciated that nobles had taken her in and raised her in the absence of her mother, and a true reminder that she had plenty of barriers she could fling up between them if she felt threatened.

He had, sadly, even unwittingly, just threatened her.

For the first time, he imagined how lonely it would be to be here without her sure acceptance, and that on top of Savigny’s anger felt almost too much to bear. He could save Savigny now; he could solve the opal problem; he could stop the border falling between Tortall and Galla; he could even do all this while teaching them the magic that they desperately needed to learn. But he couldn’t, in any fashion, do it alone. He couldn’t do it without them. And, more importantly, he didn’t want to.

“Please, magelet,” he asked of her, desperate and deserted, “don’t shut me out.”

But she did.


	23. To Say Nothing About the Artist

There came a moment where Numair despaired that they would need to beseech Donatien to get Savigny home, along with all the complications that would entail, but he was quickly reminded that it did him no good to underestimate his companions. In the end, help came, not from a king, but from Constant.

Constant returned – without the opal, which he said he’d left somewhere safe – to listen to all they had to tell him. He said nothing of the way Daine was reacting to Numair as though he was a striking snake, or of Savigny’s vague drift in and out of consciousness which mostly consisted of him opening his eyes if they said his name and the occasional flutter of his fingers. 

“Sav needs a healer,” was what Constant said in the end, expression set in a stubborn shape that disregarded all else that would distract him.

Numair, with a deep breath in as he again risked it all, said, “I have one. I haven’t made contact with them yet, but I know there’s a Tortallan healer at Lady Eloise’s estates, working there.”

“A spy,” said Constant, voice still expressionless.

“Probably,” admitted Numair. “They’re sent as assistance for me, if required. I won’t allow harm to come to them because I’ve exposed their existence, but Savigny needs a healer …”

Constant turned that resolute stare onto Numair, a glimmer of hurt appearing.

“Who in here do you think cares more for honour than they do my brother?” he snapped. “You spent the first month of your existence here almost _dead_ , and then almost died again when you healed me at great cost. I think it’s clever your people have sent you a healer. And if they save my brother, I’ll owe them a great debt.”

Daine said nothing.

“But we need to get Savigny to the Silvain estate,” Numair pointed out, feeling quite overwhelmed by this statement of loyalty from at least one of his students. In the face of his complicated relationships with Daine and Savigny, it was a breath of luxuriously clean air. To the last comment, he added a gentle, “He’s not going to die, Constant. It’s a sedative, I’m almost certain. It’s permanent damage to his leg that I’m concerned about, but you’re not going to lose him. Besides, healers are fairly ineffective against sedation. They can heal bodily damage caused by the drug, but they’re not going to be able to wake him up without a countermeasure until it’s run its course.”

Some of the strain that was imperceptibly altering Constant’s features vanished. He stared hard at his brother. Something else about him changed too – but Numair couldn’t put a name to it. Perhaps it was in the pattern of his speech the way he held himself, more like Savigny right now than Savigny himself. Numair, studying the boy, realised with the tiniest glitter of sorrow that he was seeing more than the shadow of a lord within him.

He hadn’t realised until now how sorry he’d be to see Constant grown up, with all his oddness sanded away by the stress of his status.

Then Constant looked up.

“Do you trust me?” he asked Numair.

Numair, sensing that this was the moment that would forever define his and Constant’s relationship moving forward, said, “Yes.”

Numair was baffled by the door they found themselves outside. They’d left Daine with Savigny and come, just he and Constant, to the grand wing of the palace where the nobles who kept quarters at the court had their chambers. 

“Whose quarters did you say these were?” he asked Constant as Constant knocked.

“I didn’t,” said Constant, smiling suspiciously.

The door opened. A thin, blonde, sickly man stooped there, one hand holding the door and the other a silk bag of what looked like exotic nuts. His eyes were so watery Numair’s began to water too. He was ageing dichotomously, either in his early twenties or perhaps his late forties, no in-between.

Numair looked at the man’s gloriously expensive clothes, covered in paints and chemicals, and then down further at his bare feet – also covered in stains of varying hues. When he looked back up to, with difficulty, meet the man’s eyes, he noticed that despite how bright the halls were here, the man’s pupils were dilated so the blue was a barely visible rim, the whites bloodshot.

“Little baby Constant,” said the man with an exceptionally distracted smile, letting go of the door to root about in the bag of nuts. “Almond? Non? Come, come, see what I’m working on.”

He vanished, leaving them to let themselves in. Constant led Numair into the room, revealing a disaster zone of constructions holding expanses of wood panels and stretched vellum. A long stone table against one wall – the wall and ceiling beside it scarred with burn marks – was cluttered with vials, pots, and packages of powders. Small fires contained in spelled canisters heated expensive glass beakers, the contents within searing. Around the hearth was even worse, the stone covered in so many colours it was blinding to look at and giving off a horrendous scent from whatever was cooking over it.

“Numair, this is Viscount Pech de Darragon,” said Constant of the man who didn’t seem inclined to introduce himself. “He’s the man who taught me to draw animals, and also Adel’s nephew, and also the royal artist. He’s a _genius_ with paints.”

“Genius is a word, Connie,” said Pech, vanishing halfway into a cupboard and digging for something. “I don’t hold with words. They’re so wiggly. Has anyone seen my packet? I’ve misplaced it.”

“This is your plan?” Numair whispered, watching the man hurtle around the room on a search for whatever he’d lost. “The man is on drugs!”

“Well, yeah,” said Constant, shrugging. “But he’s still –”

“An artist,” said Numair blankly, turning to look at one of the stretches of vellum. It was beautiful. Pech had captured perfectly the sunrise striking the merest suggestion of the Gallan palace, outrageous combinations of hues and shadows turning the building into a storm of fire and molten gold. The paint was layered so thick that Numair couldn’t imagine it had been laid down by a brush. It gave the impression of being something tangible _._ Something he could touch and feel, like if he pressed close enough to the worked membrane he’d feel the heat of the sun and smell warmed brick and stone.

Constant, gesturing to the beakers, said, “A _chemist_. He makes his own paints, and all his own drugs. You said Savigny was poisoned. Who else?”

“Here!” Pech appeared with an armful of shredded papers, flinging his arm ruthlessly across his table to clear a space. It almost set the papers on fire, Numair wincing as disaster was barely averted. But Pech unwrapped a length of some thick material, summoning them over to finger it. “It’s foreign, and wickedly expensive. They call it ‘canvas’. Is it not spectacular?”

Numair, not very artistic, could only shrug.

“It will hold even more paint than the wood, I suspect,” said Pech dreamily. “Imagine, Connie. A painting one can see with their hands! And when my cobalt finally works out, a blue so sparkling it will be the pride of Galla. The colour of her eyes … Ah, all those Marens and their purples – beetles, can you believe it, such a colour from _beetles_ – they’ll be clawing down our gates to get a glimpse of her blue.”

Constant was stroking the canvas as he said, “Pech, we need your help. You must have heard of the assassins?”

“Hmm, a whisper,” said Pech, barely attending. He’d become distracted again, digging through his belongings to find a roll of paper so thin Numair could see through it. Stark winter trees had been inked onto it in delicate lines, harshly clothed in their naked limbs. “Look at this, both of you. The blue, I haven’t mastered that yet, but this is fascinating.”

He held the paper over a candle, Numair intrigued as he saw the trees suddenly burst into bloom, leaves appearing on the canvas where the heat met it. The leaves unfurled like flames, the colour of smoke and ash. Faintly, the inked limbs of the trees were still visible, a haunting reminder that winter was in the trees’ bones waiting to resume once the cold returned. 

“A spell?” Numair asked, also distracted from their goal. He’d never seen something so skilful.

Pech whirled to him, sensing his interest and revelling in it. “No, imp ore! Cobalt! It creates an ink that responds to heat. I decided to see what I could do with the concept, to create something that reveals its splendour in the warmth. A fire screen? Perhaps with it I could create something beautiful for my wife but, alas.”

He lowered the paper, looking dejected.

“It’s beautiful, Pech,” said Constant, elbowing Numair as though he sensed that Numair dearly wished to look further at the screen. Invisible ink! Numair was thinking. The possibilities were endless. “She’d appreciate the gesture.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” said Pech bluntly, tossing the gorgeous paper aside as though it was worthless. Numair was aghast as it almost landed in the fire. “Who gives art designed to be viewed by candlelight to a blind woman?”

Numair’s brain choked over that. He looked from Constant to the drug-addled, wet-eyed, paint-decorated man before them. He chewed over the thought. He digested it. And he turned a very sore stare down upon his youngest student, who felt that the most important information to lead into a conversation was ‘he draws animals’ and not ‘he’s married to Solange d’Alarie, princess of Galla’.

“We need help,” repeated Constant patiently. “Pech. _Pech_.”

Pech finally looked at Constant.

Again, the boy repeated, slower, “We need help.”

“From me?” asked Pech, blinking damply. He sniffed, fiddling with his pocket where – alongside a palette knife that Numair suddenly and horribly imagined Pech tripping onto and impaling himself – there was a silver vial of the type that stimulant sniffers carried. Numair’s fingers itched to take it from him, if they were going to be asking him to assist Savigny. Preferably he would do so sober. “Bless, with what?”

Constant looked at Numair, who desperately reminded himself that he trusted this boy, and who said nothing. This was Constant’s plan. He was merely there as, well. He didn’t know. He was merely there.

“The assassins, Pech,” said Constant. His repetition of Pech’s name to keep his focus implied this wasn’t his first clash with the man’s befuddled brain. “They attacked Don.”

“Good lord, that was silly of them,” said Pech. “I hope they didn’t sully him. Though, a scar would make his Beltane portrait, when he consents to it, much more dashing. Was he cut? Maybe I could add one –”

Numair, irritated with how long this was taking, said, “Lady Solange was in the room when they attacked.”

Pech, already pale, went a ghastly shade of frightened.

Constant gave Numair a look that very clearly said in a disapproving tone ‘ _Numair_ ’. Numair ignored it. He was baffled that this strange whiskery man was somehow unaware that his wife had been endangered.

“She’s fine,” was Constant’s weary addition to that, though it didn’t seem to help. As though weakened by his shock, Pech leaned on the table as he fumbled his way to a stool and sunk onto it, breathing fast. Numair felt a little bad. Just a little. “They were after Don. Pech, they cut Savigny.”

“Another pretty face that could use a scar,” muttered Pech, mopping at his face with the silk bag that held his nuts. “I need a drink. Where is my wine?”

“You’re not going to go see if your wife is okay?” Numair queried, startled.

Bluntly, Pech said, “She prefers me as far away from her as possible. Wouldn’t you? Why do you need me? I want to lie down. I feel quite unwell.”

“They _cut_ Savigny,” repeated Constant, his voice shrill and cracking on the end. He sounded distraught. It was a tone designed to cut through any number of emotions and inspire attention, and it did so. Pech, who appeared to have sobered up from sheer shock, finally looked clearly upon him and saw the need there.

“Ah,” said Pech, gaze upon Constant and thin mouth pulled thinner. “Poison?”

Constant nodded, breathing hoarsely. 

“A sedative,” said Numair, all business now he sensed forward motion. “But he’s lost blood and he’s already weak. We need to counter it to get him out of the palace and to help.”

Wiping his nose on his sleeve, Constant sniffed, dared them with his terse expression to comment on his threatening tears, and said, “Pech lives at the Silvain estates with Eloise. They’re friends. Pech, one of the servants there, they’re a healer. We need them. We just don’t know which one …”

Pech ate his nuts in a thoughtful manner. “I had quite the experimental youth,” he mused, Numair thinking, I bet. “No doubt I can counter it, if it’s a true sedative, at least temporarily. Where is he?”

“King’s chambers,” said Constant, tense.

“Ah,” Pech sighed. “Well, if you want to remove Savigny from the premises without suspicion that he’s been injured more than what they know he has –” Numair was startled to realise they’d never voiced that desire; Pech was sharper than he appeared. This, he thought wryly, should probably have been obvious. Everything was sharper than Pech’s appearance. He looked like the offspring of a ferret and a wet sock. “– then I can certainly help with that. Savigny and I have, ah. Dabbled.”

He looked at Numair and grinned in an almost-apologetic-but-not-really fashion.

“Savigny _also_ had an adventurous youth,” he said with a wink and then a wince as he glanced down and noticed Constant was still standing there, absorbing everything.

“No one will believe Sav is drug-addled,” said Constant with magnificent innocence. 

Numair and Pech avoided direct eye-contact with the boy.

“But Lady Solange will be _riotous_ about my presence,” Pech warned. “Do you know Don requested that I paint her for the Beltane portrait? As if she’d consent.”

Numair saw a true dejection in the artist’s eyes as he said this and a suspicion sparked that Pech, for all his idle disinterest and the clear signs of an unhappy unarranged marriage, was very in love with his wife. It was only a suspicion but one that Numair would put coins on. He was good at spotting love where it lingered, and this man was an artist searching for the perfect paint to capture the hue of –

“Lady Solange’s eyes are clouded,” he said out loud with his surprise. Constant and Pech looked at him. “I mean, I’m sorry. I realised I was assuming you were painting your wife’s eyes. I shouldn’t have …”

“They were blue when she was born,” said Pech with short impatience. “The white is corneal scarring, the –”

“Outer layer of the eye,” said Numair, embarrassed. 

“A learned man,” said Pech with another stiff and a lingering stare at Numair that Numair found supremely odd. It was a stare he didn’t know how to classify. He hadn’t even asked who Numair was, and nor had Constant bothered to offer the information. As Numair watched Pech perambulate his way from his stool to yet another clutter of oddities, selecting from it a wooden box that he opened to reveal a complex series of compartments, all holding powders, leaves, and seeds, it occurred to Numair that Pech had zero interest in him as a person. That stare hadn’t been assessing him as a threat, or with sexual interest, or anything Numair understood.

Pech selected a leaf from the box, rubbed it between two of his fingers, and then, with a moue of displeasure, popped it under his tongue. “We’d best be off then,” he said, gathering his box, a leather bag, and his bag of nuts. He did not, Numair noticed, gather any shoes.

Barefoot and maudlin, Pech led the way and they followed.

Once back – it had been easier than expected to sneak Pech in, seeing as no one had emerged from the king’s bedroom – Numair was cast aside while Pech worked. Feeling useless, this meant he sat with Daine, who hadn’t said a word when they’d returned. Nor had he spoken to her. His mood, already tempestuous as he fretted over Savigny, soured further with every minute he sat there in idleness, until he was feeling brittle, liable to snap at the slightest provocation.

Daine was silent.

Pech arranged himself cross-legged on the bed beside the, once again, drowsing Savigny. He sat a small wooden bowl from his leather satchel into his lap and the wooden box he propped against his thigh. Then he put Constant to work fetching water.

“It’s not a sedative,” said Pech as though commenting on an interesting turn of weather. They all looked at him, Numair muttering an ‘I _know_ ’ that sounded petulant to even his own ears. “The man is stuporous. Sedatives sedate. They relieve anxiety, calm nerves. They soothe. This is not soothed. This is insensate. It’s a hypnotic of some form, a soporific – was he flushed?”

Numair, already crabby, responded, “He’s _black_ , Pech. Are you asking if he was fevered or if he flushed red?”

Despite herself, Daine sniggered at the expression on Pech’s face. “He was hot to the touch,” she said, fighting her smile. She appeared infuriated that Numair had made her laugh. “His skin was swollen and tight, shiny. He was sweating, though he isn’t so much now. Those are fever signs. I’d say yes he was heated, though, as Numair so politely suggested, not so we could see it.”

“He’s still sweating,” said Pech with a haughty look at Numair. “Hmm.”

He turned his attention back to his dinky wooden box of drugs.

“Better artist than a physician,” Numair muttered to himself, slumping back against the wall with his arms crossed crankily, “and right now I’m not convinced you’re a good artist either. Did he go _red_ , Mithros bless, he’s the colour of –”

“Be nice,” Daine whispered out the corner of her mouth. “We don’t need you in a mood.”

Numair spluttered. A _mood._ He wasn’t in a mood. How dare she.

“I’m not –” he hissed, sotto voce.

“Not annoyed Constant went and got someone smarter about medicines but twice as annoying as you to fix things?” Daine shot back sweetly, still whispering, still fierce. 

Numair thought about that until he’d extracted the most relevant information.

Then he responded.

“You think Pech is more annoying than me?” he said, pleased. “Does this mean I’m forgiven?”

“No,” said Daine without emotion. “It means that Pech is extremely annoying.”

Numair hid his smile. She couldn’t stay mad at him for long; he was simply too charming.

The future was looking brighter already.

While he’d been distracted, Pech had pulled a knife from his satchel of tricks. Numair, alarmed, went to sit up – but Daine caught his arm.

“He’s got a knife,” Numair hiss-whispered, wondering if the squeak in his voice was giving away his over-attachment.

Daine, without concern, said, “He’s not going to cut Sav.”

Briefly, Numair was calmed by this; calmly, Pech used the knife to slash a shallow strike along the swollen skin of Savigny’s thigh. Numair felt betrayed, swinging around to stare at Daine.

“Pox,” she muttered, standing up. “Lord, don’t bleed him more. He’s got none left.”

“I’m not bleeding him,” was the disinterested reply. Pech was busy setting out the inlaid compartments of the wooden box, taking them out and organising them on the bed around himself. Interested despite himself, Numair moved closer as well. Each square compartment held a small quantity of material: powders, seeds, leaves, tiny vials of liquid. As they watched, Pech brought the knife with its thinly blooded edge to linger above each compartment without ever touching the tip to the contaminant below. Nothing happened. Savigny shifted restlessly, lips moving without making a sound. Numair skirted the bed to come to his side, kneeling on the floor so he could feel the man’s temperature with the back of his hand. At his touch, Savigny’s lashes fluttered, showing a snippet of his green eyes. Curling a finger across Savigny’s limp hand, Numair was greatly reassured by Savigny responding to this by holding him without any real strength in the loose grip. But it was something.

A soft sound behind him alerted him to Constant’s return, the boy lingering with his eyes on that closed hand. Then he brightened. 

“It’s humming!” Constant exclaimed of the knife, which truly was emitting a low, tenacious hum as Pech circled it around one selection of compartments. It grew louder as he closed in, finally hitting its peak as a dull monotone atop one holding a collection of cubed roots. “What does that mean?”

“It recognises substances that are similar to those which you coat the blade with,” Pech said, setting the knife aside. “It’s not very useful for this purpose unless you happen to keep a range of poisons upon you, or if you’re more used to a much narrower selection of potentials.”

“Friends of yours often take too much?” Numair suggested with no real bite to his voice. Despite everything, he was thankful for this man and his obscure interests.

“It’s happened,” said Pech casually. “It’s also very useful for ensuring my supplies are clean, or for figuring out the compositions of new paints. As it should be. The cursed thing was expensive enough that I'll never tell my aunt about it. A good mage can do much the same with just their eyes, but I am not a mage.” He looked up, doing something with his mouth that in theory was smiling but, in practice, just involved a focused but inefficient movement of muscles. “A modern man makes do. Anyway, it’s mandrake root. I would assume combined with something else to increase the potency? Otherwise he shouldn’t be this unconscious without being dead, but since that ‘something’ is almost certainly magical in nature, I doubt it’s in my box of fun. Let’s proceed assuming mandrake.”

“That’s nightshade,” said Numair. “Nightshade is _fun?_ ”

“Oh, most everything is fun at least once,” replied Pech with a slow sigh of contentment, “unless you lack imagination, anyway. Now, here’s the exciting bit. I can’t wake him up. I mean …” He paused. “I _can_. But he’s not unconscious because of the mandrake. Did he become a little, ah, agitated before falling unconscious?”

“Somewhat,” said Daine as Numair and Constant didn’t answer.

“Indeed, now _that’s_ the mandrake. Hallucinogenic properties, you know. He’s probably having some very exciting dreams right now, and a wowser of a stomach-ache to look forward to.”

“Assume magical influence,” said Numair, thinking guiltily of the stone.

“Right. Well, if I wake him up it’s going to do two things. One, he’s going to still be under the influence, which means we’re going to have an injured and vividly hallucinating marquis on our hands. Useful if you want everyone to think we’re removing a drug addled Savigny, but politically fraught, I suppose. If one wants to think politically.” Pech’s distasteful expression suggested just what exactly he thought of that. “Two, the slowed functions are presumably stopping him from bleeding out. If he’s awake – and agitated to boot – they’re not going to be doing that anymore. To be honest, I’m _astounded_ he’s this affected from a sword cut, even a muscle cut. It’s so low on his body and mandrake affects the mind, so it should have lost strength before giving him more than some exciting brain tingles. Did you say the king was cut too?”

As one, the three others in the room reacted to that statement by freezing. The implication of it bore down on them: Donatien hadn’t come out of his chambers to check on Savigny.

“I think his arm was blooded,” Numair admitted.

“How delightful for him,” monotoned Pech with terrific disinterest in his brother-in-law’s welfare. “Well, good. He won’t die and that’ll keep the focus on his raving. I suggest we order a carriage to take the Viscount de Darragon home. He appears to have over-indulged once again.”

Numair was, for a moment, bewildered. It wasn’t an unusual feeling for him in the company of this man. Pech seemed to make bewilderment its own language. 

“Wrap a blanket around him,” added Pech, beginning to pack up his box. “Don’t worry. Captain Rainary has removed me before in much the same manner. No one will look twice. I am an evergreen disaster.”

“See,” said Constant in the startled silence that followed them all realising what Pech planned. “I told you. A genius.”

Pech, offended, said, “How dare you.”

How Pech removed himself from the palace without alerting the guards that the insensate mess in the fine blanket Numair and Daine had manhandled into the carriage was not him, Numair had no idea. All he knew was that the man driving the carriage abruptly pulled it to a stop midway between the palace and the Silvain estate, and a cloaked Pech in clean clothes climbed aboard. 

“I’ll have them take Savigny to my rooms,” was all Pech said to them. “Find your healer and bring them to me. Do not worry about wagging tongues among the household staff – they are loyal to Eloise over all else and none will tempt the king’s roses over her wall. He looked at Constant. “I love you, dear boy, but do tell your brother when he’s feeling better that he owes me for this. I will collect.”

“He’ll be very grateful,” said Constant, who kept turning as though he wanted so desperately to look back at the palace. “I wish we’d checked on Don before we left … what if he’s sick too?”

“Ossika would have never let you in,” said Pech. “Now be quiet. I have a frightful headache from the sobering leaf. I need silence.”

He covered his eyes with his hands.

Nothing else was said.

When they arrived, Numair was swept aside. Constant hurried away with Savigny and Pech and the servants who helped carry him swiftly through the tradesman’s entrance. Numair was puzzling through how to find his healer when he glanced to his side and realised Daine was still standing beside him. Her expression was odd. But there were people all around them. 

Numair gestured for her to follow and sidled away from the main route to the building, ending up in the extensive gardens they’d seen not so long ago. He was reminded with a single glance around the great expanses of flowering gardens just how many people called this place their home.

“I suppose we could just say hello to them all until one of them replies with a Tortallan accent,” he mused. “It’d be too much to expect that Pech would know which of them were new.”

Daine had followed, still with that odd expression, still without speaking.

“Or I could ask the hounds,” she said in a soft voice.

He stopped in the middle of the path, letting her walk into him. He was, to put it politely, shocked to see that not all their work had been undone by his foolishness.

“I thought you didn’t want to use it,” he said, turning to her and finding her rubbing her nose where it had bounced off of his back.

“I don’t want to be _forced_ ,” she stated, blue-grey eyes trying and failing to meet his gaze, as though she was afraid … or uneasy. Aware that he was looming, he found a bench to the side of the path, under a beautifully flowering tree. He went and sat there on the grass, bench to his back. Daine hesitated, fingers fiddling with the hem of her borrowed tunic before she came up beside him and sat on the bench. This put her head above his and meant she could look at him but he couldn’t peer back at her so easily. He felt, rather than saw, her relax minutely, watching her crossed legs and booted feet from the corner of his eye. 

She spoke again first.

“We shouldn’t take too long,” she said, one foot bobbing. “Savigny …”

“Will keep,” Numair hedged. While they were talking, he was adjusting his vision to examine every worker that crossed before them, searching for the bright gleam of a Gift among them. It would narrow it down, anyway. “You’ve got shadows on your mind and I’ve a desire to see them gone before we join our companions once more. Are you afraid of me?”

“No,” she said slowly, stretching it right out. Her soft commoner lilt was back. He could cry with relief. “I guess, not really. I was … startled. Why would my da be among gods?”

“I can’t answer that,” he said honestly, though he had his suspicions, as wild as they were. “I did mean it when I said the badger means you no harm, though.”

“Gods give us magic and we’re supposed to be thankful,” said Daine. “It’s cooked into it. We’ve got to bow and scrape and say yessir and nossir, thankee sir, very obliged. And if you don’t use the magic they give you – the _Gift_ , they call it, but what’s a gift you can’t give back? – they’ll send boogies down to mess up your mind or burn you alive with your own spoiled power. It’s all, people are free to walk their own ways unless they’re mages or witches or sorcerers, and then you’ve got to walk _this_ path or we’ll burn you. I don’t like gods, Numair. I don’t like being made. I want to be me first before some god gets ideas about shaping me into a trinket that glows just how they like.”

Numair thought of Alanna. She’d never been vocally dissatisfied with the Goddess’s hand on her shoulder but … then he thought of her life. He thought of everywhere she’d been, everything she’d given up. And he thought that maybe, if she’d been given the choice to push that hand away, she would be different.

He said, “I don’t want to make you, Daine. I want you how you are, but a happier, safer you. I’m not a god, or the hand of one. I don’t know what the badger or your da want with you, but I know this.”

She looked at him, dappled light playing with shadows in the shapes of the leaves above across her face. He craned back to meet her gaze, making sure he looked as sincere as he felt. No doubt could linger between them.

“I’m your teacher,” he told her, “which means you’re my student, my responsibility. For as long as you need me to, I will protect you – even if that means standing between you and a god.”

“That would be a very short stand,” she said, blinking. “They’d pop you.”

He stared at her.

She stared back.

“You have no romance in your soul, do you?” he asked, defeated. “I say I’d fight a _god_ for you, and you tell me I’d be _popped_?”

“Well, you would,” was her defiant answer. “What’s romantic about that? Oh, now you’re going to sulk.”

“I’m not sulking,” sulked Numair. 

Daine looked away, staring for a good hard moment at the distant edge of the kennels, visible through the trees. “I’m surrounded by people who are what other people have made them be,” she said, shoulders slumping. Numair’s neck was getting sore. This position had been ill-thought out. “Sometimes I just wish I could see who they’d be if _they’d_ chosen their ways. I’m scared you’re here to do the same to me. Maybe you’re Cole or Rose to my Savigny, or Queen Matthilde to my Don.”

“Daine,” he said, earning back her attention. “If I was able to give you anything in the world, what would you ask for?”

She answered, “I just want to be _free_. I don’t want to be a witch or a wife or the pet of a god. I don’t want to be a cracked beggar on the street, or a mad mage. I don’t want to be Savigny’s pity bride because he thinks that’s the only way I’ll survive, or Constant’s tag-along gissy as he grows into his lordly boots, or your ‘magelet’. I just want something I’ve never seen anyone I love have. I want to be me. That’s all. I don’t think I’ve been me since Ma died. I miss me.”

Numair stood, brushing dirt and leaves and bugs from his pants before holding his hand out to her.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go find our healer and reattach Savigny’s leg before one of Constant’s birds takes off with it.”

Daine, startled, let herself be pulled up. “Do you want me to ask the hounds?”

He shook his head.

“Let’s find who you are before we worry about who you’ll be,” he said to her, her hand in his and his heart warm for how strong her grip was despite her small hands. “You don’t need a teacher until you’re ready for one, but I sure do need a friend right now.”

Her eyes were wide, hopeful, heartsore. “You mean that?” she asked, as lovely in the shadows as she was out in the sun. “No lessons? No magic?”

“Not until you’re ready,” he promised. 

“And if I go mad in the meantime?”

He couldn’t promise she wouldn’t. He _couldn’t._ She knew it too, and he knew she knew it. It would be foolish to say otherwise.

“Then that will be a good lesson for you,” he said with a nonchalant shrug he definitely didn’t feel, pushing back the uneasy feeling that he was stepping back and leaving her in front of something terrible. “I can’t make you learn, and I’m not going to bruise both our noses trying to force it. When you’ve figured yourself out, then we’ll try again. But you have to want it.”

She smiled at him, the relief in her expression overwhelming. “You’re not much like Savigny,” said she. “He’d bolt me to the wall and chain himself beside me if he thought it’d keep me safe. He thinks freedom isn’t worth the danger.”

“Yes, well,” said Numair, thinking of Savigny’s life, “when you’re raised to guard the flock, everything begins to look like a wolf.”


	24. Before Beltane

It came to Numair’s attention that they were being followed.

“Numair,” said Daine, tense in the shadows of the trees overhead as they moved from the wooded quarter of the Silvain estate, down a slope into the neatly hedged quarter which appeared to contain yards of perfectly presented roses, buds sprouting atop them. Only a handful were in bloom, so it looked as though they were walking into a landscape of deep green rather than the riot of colour Numair suspected it would be from mid-spring onwards.

“I know,” said Numair, admiring a climbing rose over an arch. Once they were through the arch and surrounded by the walls of happy rose bushes, he turned and bowed to their guest. 

Bon Bon von Fancypaws was not soothed by this show of respect. She stood under the arch, her bi-coloured eyes watching them with dire suspicion. She was a vivid splash of white against their sylvan surroundings, even with her brown spots. 

“Hello, lovely,” said Daine, her voice trembling only a smidge. Numair stayed quiet. He let her proceed as she wished. To Numair, Daine added, “I’m going to ask her.”

“You don’t have to,” Numair said.

Daine replied, “I know.”

Then she went quiet, looking at the freckle hound as the freckle hound stared back impassively.

The dog whuffed and trotted past them, leading deeper into the roses. 

“What did she say?” asked Numair.

Daine appeared unsure. “She didn’t say anything,” she admitted, following the dog. Numair went too. It was something, at least. “She’s very … aloof. I don’t think she likes me in her mind much, or she doesn’t think much of two-leggers bothering her. But if she didn’t want us going with her, I’ve got my doubts she’d be making it so easy to do so. This is _her_ land.”

Despite herself, there was a small smile forming on her lips.

“Oh my,” said Numair appreciatively. “A lady of the estate, indeed.”

This comment immediately came back to haunt him. They turned a corner, the dog ahead of them, and Numair fell over Lady Eloise, who was dragging a bloody scrap of brown fur on a rope. She was dressed for dirt and dirt she had gathered, the rope dangling from one gloved hand as she stared at them from down on her knees. She was holding a chunk of meat in the other hand. A dog that could put Tahoi to shame with the size of it, all rippling muscle and glossy black fur with a fierce, blunted face made up of approximately every tooth, sat beside her breathing in slow, heavy rumbles.

“Goodness,” said Eloise, pushing sweaty red hair from her eyes without deigning to drop the meat first. Numair knew he was making a face. He had no control over it. “Numair, wasn’t it? Constant’s friend? And Daine! What a surprise. What brings you both here?”

“Um,” said Numair. He was very distracted. The dog had stopped looking at Numair – which Numair was glad for because the thing was big enough he didn’t think it would even need to open its mouth all the way to eat him – and was now staring at Daine as though in a trance. Numair looked at Daine and almost burst out laughing; Daine was staring back at the huge beast, loving it with her eyes.

“ _Glory_ ,” Daine gasped, launching forward to greet her new friend, who stood up with a deep groan of pleasure and began to lose great globules of drool with excitement at the prospect of her petting him. Numair, astounded that this was a woman who flinched from _kittens_ , shared a look with Bon Bon that was decidedly slighted. 

Fortunately, Eloise was cut from the same cloth as Constant. She’d forgotten her question in the face of Daine’s excitement about her hound.

“Do you love him?” she asked, patting the monstrous head with a hand that was barely the size of one his floppy black ears. “He’s a war hound. Though it used to be bigger, the King’s forces have always had a hound company, and these guys are their _prides_. Imagine being a Scanran bandit horde and a pack of our friend here comes screaming down from the mountains. There wouldn’t be a full bladder among them.”

Numair imagined it. It made his knees feel wobbly.

Bon Bon growled at the war hound, who was too busy leaning against Daine’s leg and adoring her with his soft eyes to notice the scorn.

“He’s beauty,” Daine gushed, giving him a vigorous scratch. She seemed to realise who Eloise was, a brief flash of panic passing over her features, but she recovered marvellously. “Oh, ah. We were hoping to catch you, actually, Lady. About a, um … dog.”

Eloise nodded, her mouth straight but eyes smiling. “That does seem like something one would want me for. What about a dog?”

Numair looked at Bon Bon. Bon Bon gave her neck a good scratch with a hind leg without sitting down, leaning her rear end against Numair’s leg to do so. It wasn’t an affectionate gesture. It implied he was furniture to her. He was furiously trying to think up a complicated academic question about hounds to ask, something that they would plausibly have ridden here for. It was taking up more than its share of his brain to do so.

“We’d like to buy a dog,” said Daine with very convincing sincerity.

Numair’s brain tripped over that.

“We would?” he asked, looking at the monster hound and feeling dizzy.

“Oh yes,” assured Daine, who wasn’t paying attention to her hands and thus had not noticed that her friend was joyfully rubbing his fleshy muzzle all over them, leaving behind ropes of saliva. Feeling second-hand unhappiness at the sight, Numair wiped his hands on his breeches. Eloise was never going to believe _they_ wanted to buy – “It’s Constant’s birthday at the beginning of May and I’m afraid we’ve left it cursed late to decide what to get him. He’s always said how sure you are that he needs a dog –”

“He _does_ ,” said Eloise, expression faint from joy.

“Since he’s got his birds now, and his horse, and I thought maybe it was time.” Daine, for the first time, faltered. She swallowed, glancing down at the hound and noticing her disgusting hands, though she gazed thoughtfully at them instead of – as Numair would have – running for soap and water. “I think … it’s time.”

Eloise was watching Daine with great attention. So was Numair.

“But Numair hurt himself when we came looking for you,” added Daine with a stare at Numair that told him he better spontaneously bleed, or else. “So we thought we’d find somewhere to sit first. And now we’re here.”

Eloise looked at Numair who, after almost losing his head and flinging himself into the rose thorns, said a sad, “Ow, my ankle.” It was unconvincing, even to him. 

In his defence, it had been a very long day.

Eloise disregarded Numair’s ankle in favour of the dog.

“Well, I think buying Constant a dog is a splendid idea,” she beamed. “I have puppies almost ready to be greeting new hands, if you’re looking for a pup for him. Come – we’ll go to the whelping kennel and I’ll have someone brought for Master Numair’s leg. Can you walk, Numair?”

Daine left her friend behind with one last pat on his head before coming to Numair.

“Lean on me,” she said.

Numair looked at her hands and tried to think of a reason why he couldn’t. None came to mind. There was nothing left to do but resign himself to it. With a sigh, he draped a long arm over her shoulder and propped himself down upon her, his back protesting the disparity in size. Daine sagged under his weight, muttering something she definitely hadn’t learned from whoever had taught her to speak noble. 

“Not so much of you,” she hissed to him, staggering.

“Not so much of me is still a lot of me,” he hissed back. “You’re so _short._ ”

They tried to take a step. Numair didn’t have to fake how uncomfortable it was, his sloped angle giving him a limp that was surprisingly convincing anyway. Eloise wasn’t looking, which was fortunate, as while the limp was convincing the bickering was probably not.

“You’re heavier than I thought,” groaned Daine, trying to rearrange him. Numair was deeply upset by this insinuation, looking down at his waist and becoming alarmed at the realisation that he had been doing little exercise recently. He felt girthier than usual.

“You should have said I hurt my wrist,” he said wisely, leaning further onto her shoulder as Eloise looked back at them. He made sure to smile at her in the manner of a brave and weary soldier.

“Should have said you’d hurt your head,” Daine muttered. “Only doubt she’d have believed anything could.”

Numair ignored that; he also wondered where her polite shyness around him had gone. He missed it. At least she wasn’t shutting him out, he supposed.

Bon Bon, with canny timing, took that moment to come up behind them and jab Numair’s foot with her nose. Since his weight was already off, this tipped him clear up and landed him flat on the ground with a great _whomfph_ of his air being knocked out. Daine barely managed to avoid being taken down with him, slapping her hands over her mouth – Numair almost gagged with horror – and wheezing with laughter.

Eloise came back to them, still with the bloody fur in one hand, though she’d given the meat to her friend. She stared at them. Numair couldn’t say anything in his defence; all he could do was gasp for air from his stunned lungs. This was it. She was going to catch them out.

“I’m thinking,” said Eloise, “maybe a puppy isn’t a good idea for Constant. It’s his first hound, after all.”

Daine, between giggles, said, “I agree.”

Fortunately, Eloise was the kind of person who was completely enraptured by her interests. Once the ‘physician’, as Eloise called her, was fetched – the woman who came to that summons glowed so bright with the Gift Numair was astounded he hadn’t seen her from the gates – Eloise hustled Daine away to discuss the finer points of Constant’s new hound. Numair hoped Daine knew how she was going to talk herself out of that one, but that wasn’t his concern right now. With Eloise distracted, he turned his attention to the ‘physician’.

She had the soft-lined face of Yamani-descent, framed with straight black hair that was partially pinned back. Her hands were soft, her skin the same shade of warm brown as Daine’s promised to be once she started venturing outside once again. Painted nails shaped into perfect curves were bright against Numair’s leg as she probed at his ankle, dark eyes narrowed and mouth pursed. Her name, as she’d introduced herself, was Ritsuko, and she wore a silver feather around her throat.

All he’d had to say to be sure of her being George’s healer was his name, though he followed up by warding them as they left the kennels.

“There are two of us,” said Ritsuko with little preamble. She didn’t seem inclined to get to know him, though she had listened without interruption to his request for assistance with Savigny. “Beka and I. We are Tortallan travellers, seeking Beka’s glory. She is very good with roses. You do not know us despite our shared country of origin, if asked.”

“I know about Descartin,” Numair said, following her as she led the way to the servant’s entrance of the building. He’d told her Savigny was being kept in Pech’s quarters; she’d assured him she knew where that was. 

“Do you?” she asked blandly. “How clever of you. He is distinct from our purpose here. Don’t speak of him. This lord of yours, is he of the breed who holds against the Gift?”

It seemed as though they’d run into the anti-magic sentiment already, Numair noted.

“He has the Gift,” said Numair. “Lady Eloise, is she …?”

“She shelters more than Beka and I here,” said the healer with a thin frown. “If you’re looking for allies, I suspect she may be one in spirit only, however. She isn’t an agitator. Speaking of allies, Mother sends a package from home for you. Shall we organise a discreet exchange or is your willingness to expose our position to this lord indication that we may simply deliver it to his door?”

Numair was beginning to sense that George’s healer disapproved of him.

“I suppose it would depend upon what delicacies Mother has sent me,” said Numair. 

Ritsuko grimaced. “He says he’s been told your little mirror is all well and good but the headaches it causes trying to attract your attention through the thing is hardly worth the cost of a healer following. It is a replacement. As well as coin for – he stated to ensure I was explicit that he was told to say this – you to dress yourself as a man of gold instead of a man in want of it.”

That, Numair knew with a grin, was from Alanna. Gods bless, he missed her.

“I can ensure you’re given access to the estate,” he said, vanishing that grin as Ritsuko visibly judged him. “Marquis Savigny and his companions are allies, I promise.”

“After the welcome to Galla we received,” was her dour response, “I don’t think this place knows the meaning of the word.”

Numair woke the following morning to find that Savigny was testing the limits of his healed leg in the clear space before his bed chamber’s hearth. Bundling himself more comfortably in the warm blankets and flipping the pillow so he could rest his cheek upon the cool – and undrooled upon – side, Numair admired the view. Savigny seemed opposed to clothes in the privacy of his room; Numair supported him enthusiastically in this.

Savigny noticed that Numair was awake midway through his stretches.

“I suppose I should thank you,” he said, the poker he was using as a faux pole arm during his exercises leaned gently against the floor. “I don’t have a very clear recollection of yesterday, but I do remember that slash wasn’t liable to heal well.”

Numair frowned. Savigny had taken some hours to rouse well enough for them to put him back in Pech’s carriage to be taken home. Even then, he’d spent the trip drowsing on Numair’s shoulder, and gone immediately to bed after. Though George’s healer had superbly mended the sword cut, the mandrake had run its course through him combined with the natural exhaustion of a healing.

“Do you recall what we spoke of?” Numair asked. 

Savigny, thankfully, nodded.

Numair asked, “Do you want to discuss it further?”

To this, however, Savigny shook his head. “Later,” he said, stretching gloriously. Numair resonated on a spiritual level with the great hound of the day before; he also felt inclined to gaze and drool and beg for a passionate petting. “Let me consider it further before either of us take action. Will you be getting up?”

Numair grinned.

“My lord,” he said with coy insolence, “I already am.”

Savigny examined him for the truth of this comment, still with the poker in hand. Tossing the blankets aside, Numair arched into his own stretch, moving with languid torpidity. It was magnificent, feeling his body pull against itself and loosen once more. A twinge in his arm was the only sour point, though he ignored that. All else was a reward for being alive.

Another reward was forthcoming. Savigny abandoned the poker and came to the bed from the foot of it, pushing Numair’s legs down with one hand as he kneeled upon the soft mattress. “I owe you my thanks,” he said with a heated stare through lowered lashes; Numair’s heart decided upon going its own way and attempted to gallop right out of him in anticipation. “For my leg, my brother; for Daine and all that you do for us. If you aren’t here to spy on us, then you do all this out of kindness. I am thankful for your kindness.”

“Savigny,” scolded Numair, embarrassed by the sincerity in the other man’s voice. He tried to lighten the mood with a joking, “Though, if you must, I am partial to gifts of delicious pastries. I love to be cared for.”

Savigny ignored him. He held Numair still with one hand and, his audacity breathtaking, he gave enthusiastic thanks. Toes curled into the linen and fingers in his lover’s hair, Numair showed his appreciation with a nonsense string of verbal gratitude, awakened and undone all at once. 

“I am thankful for your _mouth_ ,” he heard himself moan, earning a laugh that rumbled exquisitely along the whole length of Numair’s being. 

As far as language went, it wasn’t his most masterful use of it, but Numair suspected it had the desired outcome anyway. They tangled up with each other quite contentedly, Numair thankful for the heart in his chest with which he could feel devotion, for his fingers with which he could touch another, for Savigny’s eyes which said that which his mouth would not. 

It was quite the usual way, as he’d expected. But it had been ever so long since he’d loved another, and he was well overdue for a revelation of this kind. Clever or not, Numair gave himself to it graciously, and let Savigny do with him as he pleased.

Breakfast was, as seemed traditional for this house, bizarre. It involved a stomach-turning amount of exotic fruits preserved in sugary syrups and various dried and candied cousins of those fruits. Savigny had dug them out of his ransacked wine cellar, as the nightmare hawk had only decimated anything alcoholic. Numair, with the appetite of a much younger man, daintily ate candied plums while Savigny struggled to eat a blood red, heavily seeded fruit out of its thick syrup bath without making a mess. He was failing. There was syrup and seeds coating his poor fingers as no utensil was doing an adequate job at scooping it up as well as his fingers were. Moodily, Savigny licked his fingers clean. It was a gesture as fastidious as a cat.

Numair considered sweeping his schedule free and retiring back to bed. Jon would understand. Distractions were inevitable and those seeds, goodness. Numair had never been quite so captivated by fruit.

Daine walked into the kitchen, covered in dust and cobwebs. She looked like a spaniel that had gone burrowing under a structure, emerging happy and dirty and towing a great big stick. Though she lacked a stick, she seemed pleased enough with herself. Numair looked at her.

“Are you getting sick again?” she asked him. “You look queer. All pink around the edges.”

It took two goes for Numair to clear his throat, and only because he turned away from Savigny’s seedy seduction. “I am,” he said bravely, before looking back at Savigny and having his voice crack on the last, “ _fine_.”

“Hmm,” said Daine, disbelieving. But she turned now to Savigny. “You’re supposed to put that on muesli, you silly gosse. You’ll rot your teeth eating it straight.”

Savigny stuck his – very red – tongue out at her. It was the most affectionately immature thing Numair had ever seen him do. It was, in fact, so uncharacteristic of the man that Numair was unsure he’d actually seen it happen once it was over.

“Constant’s going to ride to the palace after lunch to see how Don’s faring,” said Daine, the easy atmosphere of the morning dropping rapidly away. “You should talk to him before that.”

“Nothing I say will make him stay,” said Savigny so sourly that Numair was surprised the seeds in his bowl didn’t wither. 

Daine, with terrible serenity, said, “Did I say to make him stay? Seems to me if you can choose to flirt with spies and eat fruit, he can choose his own path too.”

“Numair,” Savigny said, each word picked as precisely as the seeds below his fingers, “is not a spy.”

“Maybe not in your bed he isn’t,” said Daine with a grin that made Numair feel like he was about to have his ear boxed for being bad. He focused on his plums, peeling off the honey coating to spare his teeth before she turned her attention to him. But she didn’t. Instead, she walked to Savigny, sitting her rump onto the table beside him and stealing the bowl. Numair was definitely focused on his breakfast now; he couldn’t look at _both_ of them ruining him with produce.

Daine said, so quietly these words were definitely intended for Savigny only as she scooped a small amount of seeds onto three loosely curled fingers, “It’s not my place to tell you how to lord over those you feel lordly over, but I think you should consider that sometimes the firm response is messier than it needs to be.”

She closed her fingers tight around the seeds, which squirted from her grip to splatter the table with their macabre glory. Savigny stared at them. 

“He’s going to get hurt,” said Savigny.

“He already is,” Daine replied.

The two of them stared each other down, thirteen years of history and the love of one brother layered between them. Neither said anything, until …

“Does Numair have an opinion to share?” ask Daine, sweeter than the syrup she wiped from her fingers onto her cobwebbed breeches. 

“Numair is eating fruit,” said Numair, doing so. This was not a battle he wanted to step into. He felt extremely unarmed. 

“Clever Numair,” muttered Savigny. “Say I let him toddle off to the place where assassins hunt. Perhaps they aren’t aiming for him, but Solange and Captain Rainary were nearly collateral yesterday. Next time, it may be Constant between Donatien and a martyr’s knife. Have you considered that?”

“Oh, so we aren’t letting him go anywhere where assassins have been?” said Daine, too fast. Numair winced. He knew what was coming. “I suppose you’re leaving here for Hartholm any day now?”

Sav glowered. 

Daine glowered better.

Numair ate fruit.

“Why are you so fired up, anyway?” Savigny asked, giving in. Numair could see it happening by increments; Daine was going to wear him down and Savigny didn’t even realise he’d already lost. “Surely you don’t want Constant to leave. It’d just be me and …”

He trailed off. His expression, for a moment, was one designed to break hearts. The sadness Numair felt upon seeing it quite ruined his appetite.

“It would,” said Savigny, “just be me here.” He looked away, adding, “I suppose you’ll be moving on too, Daine. Back to the life you’re trying to carve out away from our collective misery.”

It occurred to Numair as he looked at the two of them then, neither of them making eye contact with each other and Savigny’s eyes so dry that Numair could tell he was deliberately not letting the emotion reach them, that he wasn’t sure he could handle seeing Savigny crying. The concept felt obscene. He’d fight to ensure it didn’t happen.

Today, he didn’t have to.

Daine was already doing so.

“I’m staying, Savigny,” she said, setting her jaw stubbornly and crossing her arms over her front. Savigny’s eyes widened, tilting back to look at her. Cautious hope sketched itself across his features. “That’s where I’ve been while you’ve been ruining your teeth. Constant’s helping me clean up the ground room where Lady Rose used to have us take lessons, the ones with the garden doors. We brought a bed down. No one’s taking lessons there now, so it might as well be mine. And it looks at the stables.”

“The stables are ruined,” said Savigny, his voice thick.

Daine replied, “We can fix them. Corentin would like to be closer to you. Maybe a …” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, Numair enthralled. “… mount for me. I’ve money set away enough for a horse, according to our accounts.”

“Your allowance is yours to claim and spend as you wish,” said Savigny. His hands were tight over his knees. 

Daine inched closer, leaning down to set her hand over his. It was the softest moment between them that Numair had ever seen.

“Constant’s making his life,” she said, shutting Numair out as she focused on reaching Savigny. Numair didn’t mind. “Maybe that’s going to take him away from us. He needs to know that it’s okay for him to go, that we’re going to be okay without him. He needs to know we’re making our own lives too. Numair says I’ve enough to make my own way as my own person with the inheritance that your parents left me, and I’ve been a fool trying to make my life from nothing because I thought nothing was what I’ve earned. If Constant’s strong enough to take a whole fief onto his shoulders, and you’re strong enough to let him do so, then I’m strong enough to accept what was gifted to me and use it to make myself more. I can do that here with you, if you want. We’ve enough room to miss each other while still existing together, which I think is how we’re best.”

Numair thought he might start crying himself. He’d cut Daine loose from his apron strings, telling her he wouldn’t be her teacher until she was ready to learn. He thought she’d take that as permission to keep withdrawing, to find somewhere to hide until she felt strong enough to face fear again with him behind her to lean on. She hadn’t done anything of the sort. She’d taken it as evidence that she was strong alone; she was shaping herself without him. 

“Also,” added Daine, her tone lighter now. Savigny rubbed his face. Not quite his eyes, but close enough that Numair had to suppress a desire to sniffle into his plums. He loved soft family moments. “You need to sit down and tell your brother that you’re not going to love him less just because you’re bedding Numair. He’s got it in his mind you’re replacing him.”

Numair coughed out a shocked, “ _What?_ ” that seemed echoed by Savigny’s stunned expression.

“And you,” said Daine, turning on Numair now he’d reminded her he existed, “need to tell him you’ve still got time for him. He thinks the grass grows from your water he’s so fond of you, and it’s ruining him thinking you’ve no time for his stories now you’ve got Savigny.”

“Preposterous,” said Numair, standing up to go do just that. Savigny stood too. “He must know I’ve all the time for his stories. Savigny has no imagination, I’d simply die of the drudgery of having to listen to _his_ tales all day. Where is he?”

“Alternating between planning my room and fretting about his birthday party,” said Daine.

Both Numair and Savigny stopped what they were doing, though Numair didn’t know if it was for the same reason. 

“We’re having a party?” Savigny exclaimed. Numair reassessed; it was definitely for the same reason. “Here?!”

Numair looked at the cobwebby corners, the cold ovens. He thought of the slate courtyard, the burned stables. The metal hawk and Pippy. He thought of the east wing.

“Here?” he echoed weakly.

“No,” said Daine, her tone adding ‘fools’ onto the end all by itself without her having to say it. “Don’s organising it. You did remember Constant’s birthday, right?”

Savigny sidled towards the door.

“Of course,” he said, grabbing his cloak from where he’d slung it over a broken fixture. “Anyway, I’m off. Back later.”

He vanished.

Daine looked at Numair.

“I remembered,” he said quickly, and honestly. He _had_ remembered. He just hadn’t remembered to obtain a present, though that was mostly because he still hadn’t retrieved the funds from George’s people. Borrowed pockets held little coin. 

“I know you remembered,” said Daine. “We bought him a dog together.”

Numair’s knees wobbled. He was recalling Eloise’s monster hound; he hadn’t known that Daine had actually bought an animal.

“Ah,” he said. “Excellent. I can’t wait to meet it.”

“You already have,” said Daine, wandering out of the room in the opposite direction from where Savigny had gone.

“Oh no,” said Numair sadly into his bowl of plums.

A delivery arrived an hour later, a parcel closed with an unfamiliar seal. It was the cinquefoil flower of Darragon fief, but with an unusual four-petal arrangement instead of the customary five. The stem of the flower was thorned.

“That’s Pech’s seal,” Constant explained when he saw it. Numair had tracked the boy down, though he hadn’t had time to speak to him about his mistaken beliefs about love being fractional. “Maybe it’s an art piece. He looked at you like he wanted to paint you.”

Numair recalled Pech’s strange stare and thought this explained a lot about the man. He was rather flattered. He’d never been painted before. Just in case, he retired to the privacy of the burned stables to open the package, leaving Constant and Daine to their dusting of Daine’s new room. It was a wonderful spring day. Numair was glad to be outside and the stables, now, very much counted as so. 

Inside the package was one of the rider-styled three-panelled mirrors that Numair had helped them design. There was a heavy purse of coins, as well as paperwork signed with Jon’s seal that would entitle him to access to Crown funds, if he were in dire straits. He tucked them away. There was a packet of coded letters in both George’s and Alanna’s handwriting, and one short missive from Onua that simply said, ‘Safe. Take care.’ A great weight slid from his shoulders at that. 

There was also a book. It was one of Numair’s, one he’d left in his palace quarters before leaving for Sinthya. He was surprised to see it. Out of everything he’d expected to be sent, a book of mammals and their anatomy – much like Constant’s but far more spectacular in its drawings where Constant’s was medical – was the last. He had no idea why Alanna, or George, would have thought of it, or how they’d have known where it was. The last time he’d used it was teaching a lesson to the royal children …

His fingers trembled from some deep, soul-stricken feeling that was consuming in its intensity. He opened the book, the creak of the loved spine intimate in the silence of the burned structure. There was a note between the cover and the opening page. It was not from George, or Alanna.

_Numair,_

_Alanna told me about Veralidaine. I thought this would be something you may share with her, as you have my children. It is a tremendous thing to hold out your hand to someone who has never known such a gesture before. When you are alone in an unfamiliar land, trust in the kindness of people and allow them to trust in yours._

_We miss you dearly. Fly home safe when your business is done._

_T._

Numair pulled his knee to his chest and rested his head upon it, the book crushed between his chest and leg. Homesickness swamped him. He felt like a hypocrite for scorning Savigny’s passionate dedication to his king; Thayet’s short, loving note had reminded him how fiercely he’d burn for Tortall and its monarchs. A queen who took the time from her day to think how best to soothe a frightened, foreign woman, a woman she’d never meet. To remember her name and offer her a kindness extended across borders. He wanted to go home and take their hands and tell them how much the world needed leaders like them. 

He wanted to go home.

The final item in the packet was a wooden container. Numair was expecting a weapon, knowing Alanna, or some tricky piece of spy craft, knowing George. He was not expecting to find it filled with sweet cocoa-coated spiced apricot balls, a delicacy from Carthak that he had only ever had a handful of times since fleeing there. They were a delicacy he loved though they were rich and upset his stomach. He associated them with sitting with Varice as she stuffed him full of them while they studied, and with the only person in Tortall who craved them as much as Numair did.

Numair ate one, closing his eyes as the buttery taste of the cocoa filled his mouth, tarted with the dried fruit inside it. The spices made both his tongue and heart ache.

“Thank you, Sarge,” he whispered as though his voice could be heard by the man from here.

When the sweet was finished, Numair reached for his new mirror. It was time to call home.

Finally, Numair cornered Constant alone. He had to wait for the boy to slip up to his rooftop hideaway to see to his birds, levitating himself up and smiling when Constant cheered for him. Constant was leaning by the opening to the hideaway, Numair picking his way across the slate tiles and looking in. There was a comfortable nook in there, among the rafters and dust. Books and blankets and bird debris littered it, along with sketches and paints. Constant had spent a lot of time up here, though Numair doubted he was ever lonely while doing so. Some places were designed to be enjoyed alone.

Constant sat with Pippy circling overhead. Rum was perched on a peak of the roof, staring across the sky. The metal bird looked settled, for once. He didn’t even seem to be considering battling Pippy.

“He’s been strange today,” was the first thing Constant said, looking to his Immortal. “I don’t know why. I’ve checked so many books, but I can’t find anything about him.”

“He might not have ever been seen before,” said Numair, settling himself down next to Constant. “Maybe not in living memory. Some Immortals exist only in the Divine Realms, and it’s only recently we’ve seen any Immortals at all. They’ve been locked away so long.”

“That’s what Don told me,” Constant said. “What could be making him so sad?”

Numair, without thought, said, “Maybe he’s homesick.”

Constant’s head snapped around. He stared hard at Numair, who did his best to look as though he’d never felt homesick in his life. Apparently, it wasn’t convincing.

“Sav’s going to be very sad when you leave,” Constant said, picking at a thread on his shirt.

“I’ll be sad to leave too,” said Numair, truthfully. He wanted to go home. He just wished these people would be going home with him. It was beginning to feel like he was leaving pieces of his heart scattered across three nations, with no way to ever reunite all the parts he’d given away. “Constant, we need to talk. You know about Savigny and I, don’t you?”

“You’re courting,” said Constant, expression closed off. This was the closest to moody Numair had ever seen him. “I’m not a child. I know what happens when lovers court. You’re going to make him heartsore and he’s going to get mean again.”

“We know ours is a temporary courting,” Numair scolded gently. “Sometimes people do that because they like each other and it’s nice to be liked, even if just for a little while. It doesn’t make it mean any less that it’s not forever. Savigny is a clever man. He knows what he’s doing. But that’s not what I’m worried about. You do know that Savigny loves you just as much now as he did last week, as he did last month – as he did before I ever came into the picture? Nothing I have done has changed him in that way.”

“He never has time for me when he’s with Don,” said Constant with rank bitterness. Numair could taste the historical spite that had built up on the topic. “Not ever. They just eat everything about each other until there’s nothing left. There’s no one else in the world who exists but them, except maybe Daine, sometimes. But even then, you can tell she’s one half of them and both of them together are the other. It’s just … I don’t know.”

Numair thought that, really, Constant knew more about it than he believed. After all, he’d always been on the outside, looking in. And he was sad that this was so.

“Sometimes,” he said heavily, “love isn’t good for you. It’s a spectacular, heady, wild feeling, but this is what makes it dangerous. People accept loves that aren’t good for them because they’re scared of not having that feeling anymore, like a drug. If you’ve always had that love, that drug, that person, not having it suddenly feels empty and frightening, hollow. It feels an awful lot like …”

He sought for what it felt like.

He thought of Ozorne.

He said, “It’s an awful lot like being dead.”

Constant shuddered. “That sounds horrid,” he said. “I don’t know why anyone would want that. That’s not how _I_ love people.”

“Well, not everyone loves like that. Love is as complicated as people and comes in just as many shapes. I’ve found that people who love like that, who put so much of themselves into it that it feels like nothing else is worth anything to them – like how I think Savigny makes you feel, sometimes – I think that love comes from somewhere sad. It’s a love that only people who have been starved of it feel, because only people who know what it’s like to be devoid of love can be so intimately afraid of being so again.” Numair stopped. Constant was looking at him like he’d grown eight heads and a bad moustache. He felt embarrassed for prattling on. 

“But I love Sav,” said Constant with fierce honesty. “And I always have. So he shouldn’t feel like that.”

Numair looked out over the slate and stone of Cría. He saw temples and steeples. He saw spires. He saw smoke and life and light. A city alive; a city that was filled with people all with their own small, personal glories and triumphs, disappointments and sorrows. 

“I don’t hold very much with secrets,” he said slowly, knowing Savigny would never forgive him for this. Constant was quiet. “I think secrets can be used to hide terrible things. And children who are taught secrets too early, I think those secrets in particular are the most dangerous. Constant, having said this, I’m going to ask you to hold a secret for me. Please. Don’t tell your brother I said so, because I think this is something that is his alone to share with you. I also don’t think he’s going to be able to before it’s needed.”

“I don’t like this,” Constant said, looking up to his bird with anxious eyes, as though longing to hold her close. Pippy flew down as though summoned, making soft worried sounds as she clattered down next to him and peered at his face. 

“I know. I’m sorry.” Numair took a breath of the warm, spring air, and plunged into betrayal. “You’re going to the palace, I know. You’re set upon it and, perhaps, it’s the right thing to do. Savigny can’t stop you and Daine won’t, and it’s not my place to comment upon it. But … I think, I suspect – _suspect_ , Constant, not confirmed, so you must form your own opinions on this – that when Savigny was raised there, he was hurt by someone who taught him too young to keep secrets. Did you know that Savigny’s Gift was bound?”

Constant shook his head.

“Like mine?” he asked. 

“Somewhat. But … nastier. It’s what hurt you that day when it lashed out, some vicious trick someone had wound into what they’d taught him and laced into the fabric of his Gift. Every time Savigny used his Gift, it burned him. Someone made it do that. Someone who he must have trusted because you have to _let_ people access your Gift. They can’t just do it. Someone who made sure he didn’t tell his parents about that access.”

Numair watched Constant closely, unsure if he was explaining this well or even at all. The boy appeared thoughtful now, though unhappy about it.

“Someone at the palace,” said Constant finally, eyes cold. “Someone who might still be there?”

Numair nodded.

Constant said, a hint of noble sharpness in his tongue, “Someone who might be doing the same to Don?”

That startled Numair though, of course, he had considered the same. The opals were such a perverse misuse of the Gift, it seemed appropriate they’d come from the same twisted mind as Savigny’s torturous bindings. “Potentially, yes. Someone who may be a danger to you, as well.

Constant, sitting tall, said, “And you want me to look out for who it might be?”

Numair winced. “No,” he said. “Look, yes. Talk to people as you do everywhere. Keep your eyes open, but do _not_ go out of your way to put yourself in danger. This person, or persons, are dangerous, and they can hurt you in ways I can’t protect you from. Constant?”

Constant looked at him, young and innocent and so vulnerable that Numair wanted to scream, knowing how Savigny felt at the concept of taking this boy and throwing him into the dragon’s mouth.

That was why Numair said what he said next.

“Please,” he said, “beware of Cole.”

Constant went very still. Pippy hissed, feathers ruffling for a moment before settling again. 

“You think Cole hurt Savigny?” said Constant in the kind of voice Numair had worried he’d incite from him. It was the kind of voice that was only created by rage, or hatred. It wasn’t nice to hear from Constant. 

“I don’t know,” said Numair with careful attention. “But Savigny is afraid of him.”

“Sav isn’t afraid of anyone.”

“He’s afraid of Cole.” Numair was exhausted, as though he’d run a marathon instead of having a single uncomfortable conversation. “Until we know more, don’t let yourself be alone with him. Don’t let Donatien be alone with him. And be careful. If it is Cole who did that terrible magic, then he’s as dangerous as a cut snake. Don’t get within striking distance.”

After all, he privately thought, anyone who could take a child they had care of and twist their Gift so maliciously must be heartless. Someone so incapable of love was capable of anything. 

This he believed utterly.

“I promise,” said Constant with all the sincerity of his almost-fifteen years.

“That’s all I ask,” said Numair. He knew his warning had been heeded, as sorry as he was to have had to give it. Now, he had to hope Constant didn’t say anything to Savigny, at least for now. They needed more time beside each other before this could be settled.

Voices distracted them, Numair and Constant looking to the edge of the roof as they heard the balcony door opening. Daine and Savigny, talking together, came out onto the balcony and then towards the roof. Numair was surprised to see, first Daine, then Savigny, climb up.

“Wow,” said Daine, looking around. “It’s been an age since I stood up here. Though, we used to inhabit the bit over there.” She pointed across the roof, though Numair couldn’t see much but more roof. “It’s flatter over the bedrooms, and less chance the lord and lady would hear and come get us down. Plus, there’s a tree which could get us the whole way up if we didn’t want staff noticing us.”

“You used to come up to the roof?” asked Constant, shocked. This had obviously been his world for so long he’d never considered it being someone else’s.

“Usually to drink,” said Savigny in an absent tone, wandering off across the roof. Numair felt vertiginous watching him go, though Savigny, as always, had excellent balance. 

Daine was smiling dreamily. “Don would steal the richest wines from his ma,” she said, coming to sit beside Constant and pet Pippy. “Then they’d come here on Sav’s visits with his parents and we’d creep up and watch the sun set and get so terribly sick on drink. I don’t know how we never fell off.”

“Don almost did a few times,” floated back Savigny’s voice from where he was leaping from one peak of the roof to another, stopping Numair’s heart as he slid in an uncontrolled manner to wherever he was going. “Remember the whiskey?”

“Oh, bless,” giggled Daine, “the _whiskey_. It was unhappily strong. Me and Sav, we got so silly on it we couldn’t move, just flopped on the flat bit feeling sorry for our stomachs and heads in between deciding we’d solve all the world’s problems with our genius. But Don, he wanted to go look at his city, and he goes stumbling off and ends up losing his stomach over the gutter, right onto the path where a visiting lady was walking. I was certain we’d be caught.”

Savigny was out of sight. Constant was goggling at this tale.

Daine’s smile vanished and her expression was soft and sore all at once.

“We never got in trouble,” she said, looking away. Numair thought she might be seeing something none of them could, except maybe Savigny, and except maybe Donatien. “They must have known. At least, your da, Constant … he must have known. But he never scolded us. I think maybe he thought it should be something that was ours, maybe. He was like that, you know. Sometimes he could just be so …”

She stopped. Whatever he could be, she couldn’t find the words for it.

Constant looked overwhelmed.

Daine managed, “Sometimes, it was like he wanted different for us.”

Numair decided he shouldn’t be here for this. He stood and, with liberal use of his Gift to stick him to the slopes and dips of the elegant roof, he made his way over the peak to where Savigny had vanished, mostly to let Daine tell Constant about his lost father, but also to make sure Savigny hadn’t broken his fool neck with his acrobatics. 

He found Savigny staring out at the city in much the way he imagined Don must have all those years ago though, he noted, Savigny wasn’t looking in the direction of the spires and temples of the glittering Jewel, or back up the mountain to the superb sight of the palace behind them. He’d come around the building on his own dangerous, impossible path so he could stand with one hand bracing himself, staring at the smoky smudge of the Bog on the slopes below Cría. As high as the estate was up the mountain, though the Bog was walls away from them, it was a visible stain on the city below.

Numair wondered if that was what Savigny saw when he looked at it, if he saw the way the stone and slate of the city proper turned into the ramshackle grime of wood and metal. If he saw how the quality of the smoke changed the lower into the city one went, as those who couldn’t afford clean coal and wood burned whatever they could find. He wondered if Savigny could see how the city was built different for those it didn’t welcome.

“Do you know why the Bog burns so easy?” asked Savigny.

Numair, startled, answered, “It’s made of wood, Savigny,” which earned him a muted laugh.

“Well, yes,” said Savigny, turning and glancing at Numair. Numair saw him study how Numair was using the Gift to hold himself in place and was surprised and pleased to see that, as soon as his observation was done, Savigny did the same with his own. It wasn’t as though he needed to do so. He just did it because he’d seen something new and wished to practice it, just in case. It was pleasing to see someone learn so openly. But Savigny was speaking again, and Numair attended to that: “You see the wood and the rot, of course. Everyone does. What you don’t see is that it’s by _design_.”

Numair was baffled. He let it show on his face, in the hope that Savigny would explain.

He did, sweeping his arm out to encompass his city, though Numair suspected he was only really gesturing to one part of it. “The Bog is so much more than just wood and poverty, Numair,” said Savigny with a passion that Numair had never ever heard in him before, his eyes ablaze, his words alight. Numair looked, trying to see what Savigny saw. “It’s incipit. It’s a city beginning, the birth of something. It’s made of wood, yes, purposefully transient. If you burn it, it can be rebuilt. Over and over and over again, it will rebuild, like ants. Kick the nest, step on them, flood them, burn them. They’ll come back. They build again and again and again, more of them every time, every time angrier. It burns because it’s meant to. It burns because the burning makes it strong. It encourages new life, new _rage_. It reminds the ants that they’re angry. They’re _so_ angry.”

Numair stared at Savigny, seeing – not the Bog as he described it – but a Savigny he’d never seen before. Something feral and shocking had burst into existence in the man beside him or, rather, it had been revealed from where it had simmered out of sight, as nascent as a city’s birth. 

Savigny, vivid, alive, realised, stark against the sky, said, “The Bog burns because its people burn it, and they won’t stop lighting fires until the feet that kick them burn too. The world is changing, Numair Salmalín. _We_ are changing it.”

Numair, seeing him standing there, didn’t just believe these words. He feared them too. 

He wondered how hot a fire had to burn to topple a city made of stone, and the people who’d built it that way.


	25. Not All Those Who Glitter Are Gold

Cría came passionately to life on Beltane.

Numair had never seen a city rouse so evocatively to a season. In what felt like a single night, the Gallans threw aside the cape of winter with an exuberance unfamiliar to him, raised as he was to the dichotomous Carthakian seasons of hot or hot and wet. Tortall slid grossly from winter to spring, muzzy rains keeping everything sodden well into the growing months, nothing like the transformation the mountains personified. From cold and still, they came alive; the coloured houses complimented with flowers barely tamed into their basket homes, wound around poles and draped from sills. Arches sprung up over cobbled streets; ribbons were wound into the halters of every horse in sight. Even the dogs were bedecked with bows and bells, stray or owned. 

Numair stepped out of the estate Beltane morning to find that the sky was bluer than he’d ever seen, sharp and crisp on the high mountain air, and that the people were celebrating it in style. The men of the Jewel dressed as bright as peacocks, resplendent in jewelled tones of emerald and sapphire and dazzling shades of yellow unlike any stone Numair had ever handled. Many of them wore headdresses made in the visage of great antlered crowns, their tines woven with delicate bell-shaped lilies of the palest white. The women in their pastel dresses and their armfuls of flowers were quieter in their clothes but vivid in their liveliness, leading their lovers on dances through the stalls that spilled into the streets and alleys of Cría as though nothing could bear to stay inside. The children dressed as animals of the woods with painted faces and furred ruffs on their dresses and sleeves. Everywhere Numair looked, he saw laughing people and dancing feet, strangers sweeping each other up as they cheered the death of winter and gave thanks to their favoured gods for spring’s return. Galla took Beltane and made it its own; Numair couldn’t stop drinking it in as greedily as a starved man faced with a feast.

The city wasn’t the only thing changed by the festival. Though they’d had weeks from the confirmation of Constant’s birthday celebrations to prepare, and Daine and Constant had both warned Numair that Savigny adored Beltane with a passion that was hard to match, Numair was still caught by surprise. 

“This will not _do!_ ” Savigny had bellowed, bursting into the kitchen with a violence that was shocking. Numair had barely had time to swallow the last of his porridge before he, Constant, and Daine had been whirled out of their seats and thrown out into the commemorative chaos of the streets. Savigny had barely stopped to admire the festivities, striding with single-minded fervour to some undisclosed location. Daine and Constant, barely awake, stumbled after. 

Numair was too captivated by the city’s transformation to question them further.

Cast aside as Daine was swept into the building, Numair and Constant amused themselves at a flower stall across the street. Numair paid the girl attending to paint Constant’s face as a hawk’s, giving him a yellow beak-nose and speckled feather cheeks. Constant couldn’t stop giggling throughout, blurring his barred lines. As Numair flirted with the girl’s mother, earning himself flower crowns to drape across his head and to twine prettily around his arms for his troubles, feathers were pinned to Constant’s hair and shirt-front, completing his costume. 

“I’m definitely wearing this to the palace,” Constant declared, examining his feathered face in the reflection from a polished piece of brass.

Numair glanced across the street to the tailor’s shop Savigny had pulled Daine into.

“I suspect your brother has other ideas,” he said with a smile, leaving Constant there to preen as he slipped over to peer in through the door, propped open as it was by a weighted basket. Musicians had begun to play music wherever they settled, the sounds of celebration bringing people from their pursuits to join each other in dance upon the cobbled streets. Three people asked him to join them, but he only had eyes for his companions today.

Numair found them in the main room of the tailor, lurking by the door as Savigny pulled Daine into a twirl that had her gasping with laughter even as she tried to pull away to hide her face. Numair was struck dumb. They’d left the estate dressed much as they usually did, Daine in Constant’s clothes and Savigny dressed to draw eyes. Evidently, this day had been planned without Numair’s awareness, as that was not how they were dressed now. Savigny was divine in deep green and velvet black; but Numair was of the opinion that Savigny could look divine in a scrap of hessian sacking. Daine, though. Daine was lovely to him, always, ever since they’d first held hands in the dark, but now …

He’d never seen her in a dress, he realised. Especially not one tailored so pretty to show off her elegant lines, still lithe, still strong, but in a fae, undomesticated way. Her masses of smoky curls were loose, Savigny catching her in her shyness to help fix to her hair a net of such fine thread it was invisible except for where flowers were woven into it; blue, pink, orange, and a deep violent purple. When the addition of her floral headdress was added, Savigny kissed her gently on the temple and Daine, with an undignified sound, swatted him away.

“Look at you,” said Savigny with such magnificent fondness, gazing at her. He was a different man today, a smile always a second away from lighting him up and some incredible energy driving him. Numair must have made an appreciative noise, because Savigny looked up and saw him. With another of those dazzling smiles, of such comfortable vivacity that Numair ached to realise that Savigny must have once smiled like this in his everyday life, Savigny swept over to Numair and took his hands. “I didn’t forget you,” Savigny said to him, drawing him further into the room as the tailor bustled in.

“Is this your man, then, Lord?” asked the woman, looking Numair up and down critically.

Savigny said, “He is.”

Numair’s heart felt as flimsy as Daine’s flower veil, even as she caught his eye and blushed a vivid red at him seeing her dressed so feminine. 

To her, Numair said, “You look absolutely beautiful, Daine.”

Daine went, if possible, even redder.

“Scoundrel,” she muttered into her palms, turning away with a toss of her head that he knew was intended to sass him but instead made her the flowers tumble even more naturally into the masses of her curls, his heart full of the sight. 

“Let’s make him a man deserving of your company then,” declared the tailor.

Numair hadn’t been paying attention, distracted as he’d been by Daine. He zoned back in.

“Pardon?” he said.

Savigny smiled.

Numair looked at himself in the small mirrors set up for just this purpose, seeing someone looking back he hadn’t seen since Tortall. Savigny hadn’t arranged for him to be dressed as a Gallan today, in their flirty slashes of hidden colour and tight, high-waisted breeches. His clothes were Tortallan, from the fine leather boots upwards, except for the soft spring of lilies pinned to his shirt atop his heart and the chain of daffodils he still wore jauntily cocked in his hair. 

They were alone in the private dressing room, just Numair and Savigny. 

“If I’d have forewarning you planned to dress me, I’d have been worried,” said Numair without looking back to where Savigny watched. “I’d have expected furs and fripperies. This is very restrained.”

“I wanted to see you as you would have been had we met at some court function,” said Savigny quietly. “Perhaps if our worlds were different and our paths had crossed another way. I was curious to see if you’d still draw my eye dressed as yourself.”

Numair looked at himself again. He had to admit, though he was a fashionable man, in his own way, and though he had a taste for fineries, he’d never quite have dressed in quite this cut or style. The colours were just slightly too bright, the shape of the pants minutely off to his eyes. And the flowers, of course, were unique to this moment. 

Hands settled on his hips from behind, lips brushing the line of his neck where the shirt didn’t quite cover. Numair turned into the grip, finding a mouth to meet his and eyes to appreciate.

“I presume this means you approve,” he said, giving in the romance of the day.

“I do,” said Savigny. “One last thought. It is traditional for the courtier to gift his desired match with something to illustrate their loveliness. A trinket as alluring as they are, so everyone can see that they’re treasured.”

Numair was quite astonished by this side of the man, as startled as he’d been by the rebellious flame he’d glimpsed on the roof weeks prior. Struck dumb by this surprise, he said nothing as Savigny offered his gift.

“These are too splendid for me,” said Numair, awed. Savigny had given him simple eardrops of silver and sapphire, elegant in their modesty. They had clearly been chosen to be bright flashes of glitter against his dark hair and brown skin without being too astonishing, the perfect accompaniments to his Tortallan finery. 

Savigny laughed, withdrawing to leave the eardrops in Numair’s hands.

“If you decline the courtship, tradition dictates that I allow you your refusal,” he said with a mock bow. “That means no dancing, and no leaping over the coals. Such a pity. I do adore the dances. You get to keep the trinkets though. They’re gifted without expectation of acceptance.”

Numair thrilled all over; Savigny was going to _dance_. This was by far the most excellent assignment he’d ever been placed on.

He stepped forward and caught Savigny’s hand, pulling the man back to him as he bowed his head and kissed those elegant fingers.

“And how does the courted accept their lover’s affection?” he murmured in a husky voice designed to madden and titillate. It worked. Savigny’s pupils noticeably diluted, the pulse in the wrist that Numair rested his fingers against racing. “Traditionally, I mean.”

“Flowers, of course,” said Savigny, his own voice taut. He shook himself loose and took the eardrops from Numair, stepping closer to affix them to Numair’s lobes. Numair inhaled him, feeling one step away from falling into silliness. Savigny seemed to feel the same. His fingers trembled. He said, “Numair, I –”

But whatever he was, it was lost to the moment as Daine knocked in a brisk fashion and then came in without waiting to hear that they were decent. Numair thought that was very brave of her.

She looked Numair up and down on her way in.

“You clean up nice, I s’pose,” was her response before she turned to Savigny. “I’m borrowing Numair. We’ve got to pick up Constant’s present before heading to the palace. Will you come?”

“No,” said Savigny, stepping away from Numair and making a show of adjusting his sleeves. This close to him, Numair could smell the scent he’d daubed onto his clothes – rosewood and musk – and see how his cheeks were very subtly darkened, the undertones flushed warm. “I must go do the same. I’ll take Constant home first and bring him and the horses to the palace before I attend to his gift. Shall we meet there?”

“Oh, yes,” said Numair with feeling. “I believe I’m owed a dance.”

“Savigny is acting very strange,” said Numair to Daine as they lined up to enter Lady Eloise’s estates. Every noble in Galla seemed to have beaten them here. This was clearly an expected outcome of the day, as stalls of food and capering entertainers had also found their way to the Silvain walls. Numair was very distracted by watching a man dance with two poles that were alight with flame, his acrobatics astounding when combined with the danger of the fire.

“Not really,” said Daine with a shrug. “I told you. He’s fierce about Beltane. He always has been. Every year he goes and gets us all prettied up and makes us dance long into the night.”

Numair pondered that.

“Beltane is the Mother Goddess’s festival, is it not?” he asked. “Is he a follower? I wasn’t aware he was particularly devout.”

Here, Daine hesitated, fiddling with the skirt of her lovely dress.

“Savigny’s relationship with his gods is complicated and private,” she said with caution. “He rejects the Mother though, and I don’t think we really turn our eye to her on Beltane, anyway. Maybe some, but not most. Many of the men patronise the God of the Hunt and ask him to protect all the newborn forest babes, that they might grow strong and fast and challenge them in years to come. Constant likes him too, so far as I know, but not because he’s a hunter. He was his da’s god and it makes Constant feel closer to him to worship as he did, I suspect.”

“Does Savigny follow the Hunt God?” asked Numair, enthralled by the topic.

The line moved sluggishly. The Silvain guards were checking everyone who wished to walk the ornate gardens. Even amongst the brilliant festivities of love and birth, fear lingered. 

Numair wondered how the lower cities celebrated Beltane.

“He has,” demurred Daine with a shrug, distracted briefly by accepting a rose that a small boy ran up and offered her. She bobbed a curtsey for him and gave him a flower from her hair in return, the boy grinning so big the smile looked liable to tip him over as he ran back to show his mama his gift. Numair saw the boy’s sister hiding behind her mama’s skirts and winked to her, seeing her squeak and hide her blushing cheeks. “I don’t know if he does so much now. He never wears the hunt crown on Beltane.”

Looking around, Numair saw more of the tined crowns atop men’s fine heads. It was a common enough headgear that, now his attention had been drawn to it, he could find examples aplenty. Even some smaller boys – and a few girls of all ages that Numair’s sharp eyes spotted – wore it. There was also, he noticed, some revellers wearing sheer green veils, male and female.

“I like that he dressed you for your home,” said Daine, looking away very deliberately. “It’s nice to see you looking so comfortable instead of like a hawk perched in a pigeon loft trying to coo. He did it for me too, you know, when I was new. Drew me out careful and took me to get a dress that was just like being home. I wasn’t as handsome about it as you though. I bawled myself sick thinking of Ma, Sav holding me the whole time telling me I shouldn’t be shamed by crying. And …” She drew a breath, exhaling it with a shrug and a sad smile. “And Don, he was there, fretting. He’s fair wonderful with crying people, usually, but I think me with my whole family dead was too much for him, as small he was. I just remember him standing there wringing his hands with his flowers and his fine princely clothes and an antler crown he’d made himself from twigs. He’s not supposed to wear it, you see, because as the crown of Galla he has to respect all gods. But he really wanted to.”

Numair gathered this spill of emotions close, knowing that Daine was feeling sorry right now for all the time that had passed and everything that was lost to that passing. Her murdered family, Savigny’s easy smiles, the innocent kindness of her king’s youth.

“It’s time to go in,” he pointed out gently, taking her hand.

“So it is,” she replied, letting him. 

Constant’s present was not, as feared, a monster hound. It was so much better.

“Oh, _Daine_ ,” said Numair, busting with pride as Eloise showed them to where Constant’s gift waited with a pink and blue bow around her throat, her coat combed to a high gloss and standing so proud in this glorious moment. “She’s more perfect than I ever imagined.”

Daine examined the dog with a critical eye, the dog examining her right back. 

“She’s a sensible choice,” said Eloise, patting the dog’s soft head. “You were very right to choose her. And they’re already so fond of each other, I can’t think of a better hound to walk beside him.”

Bon Bon von Fancypaws huffed at them as though they were taking far too long to get her where she wanted to go, stalking past them for the door. Daine giggled at her.

“Where’s she going?” said Numair, peering out to watch her walk towards the gate and then sit down, staring back at them impatiently.

Still giggling, Daine said, “She says hurry up, she wants to go home to her boy.”

Numair blinked. He looked at the dog. He looked at Daine.

And he said, “You didn’t pick her at all, did you?”

“Oh, no,” said Daine, shaking her head. “She was very firm from the start that if Constant was to have a dog, it would be her.”

Numair grinned and let a bit of the spirit of Beltane overtake him. He trotted to catch up to the dog, standing before her with his hands on his hips and his sternest, frilliest frown. Bon Bon watched him with her brown-spotted face expressionless.

“Do you promise to take care of him?” Numair asked of her, waggling a finger down at her. “He has a penchant for falling from roofs and a very delicate heart. You have to promise to love him dearly if we’re to give him into your care, Lady Bon Bon.”

Eloise and Daine had come up to them, Daine sniggering fit to burst and Eloise smiling.

Bon Bon yawned hugely.

Numair looked at Daine.

“She says,” said Daine between giggles, “she’s met day-old puppies with more bite than you, and that if you want to tell her how to raise babies then you better go grow a tail and some sense. You’re really not sensible at all, are you?”

Numair turned his silliness onto her instead. 

“I’m certain I never told you otherwise,” he said, beaming at her. A thought occurred to him as his bobbing and bowing reminded him of the soft weight at his ears. “Oh, Daine, one more thing …”

At the palace, Numair, Daine, and Bon Bon parted ways with Eloise as they were seen by Rain, who led them into the majesty of the royal gardens. The place had been transformed since the last time Numair had been here. They were led through gardens open to the public – at least, the public of the Jewel – with all the festivities from outside spilling in. Numair saw ladies dressed as fine as a summer’s day mingling with bakers and maids, the only divides between them in their dress. They stood shoulder to shoulder watching the makeshift staging areas set up for dancers and acrobats, stalls set up all around offering baskets and gifts made of flowers and glitter. Numair wanted to see _everything_ ; he was cursing that he was only born with two eyes and two hands when there was just so much to see and touch.

“Don’t get distracted,” Daine hissed at him as they approached a great pavilion. “You can go gallivanting off after we’ve seen to Constant.”

They passed through the guards without comment, led as they were by Rain.

Within the pavilion, long tables covered in sheer fabrics to keep insects away from delicate foods and drinks filled the space. The floor was uncovered, just grass, though one side of the canvas pavilion linked to the open wall of a great ballroom. Grass flooring smoothly became stone, which swooped into the glossy wooden dance floor. Numair delighted in the clever lanterns and strings of coloured candles set up around the doorway as they crossed from grass to stone, dearly wishing to know what was in the candles that were scented so and gave off such a steady and soothing light. 

At this stage of the day, the space was mostly rushing staff moving to put all the pieces of the party together, though Numair spotted a small gaggle of nobles in the centre of the chaos. It was them they were led to by Rain, Numair stunned to see Solange sprawled ingloriously on the floor with her features set in a frown and Donatien slouched against a nearby table. Two noble ladies Numair didn’t know lingered close, and Constant was sitting next to Donatien with his hawk-painted face scrunched into a frown.

“I don’t need it,” Solange was saying, waving her hand dismissively. “Perhaps if you didn’t insist on replacing _my_ handmaids, Donny, this wouldn’t happen.”

“I didn’t replace them,” said Donatien with the air of repeating something he’d said before and was rapidly tiring of. Numair was surprised to see that Donatien was dressed sombrely in a grey outfit that left him looking about as lifeless as the wall he was propping up. He’d have thought someone who’d courted Savigny would have more style. “You haven’t been home in years. I don’t know where they’ve gone. Why on earth would matters of staff be my concern?”

He rubbed spasmodically at his eyes, twitching as he caught sight of Numair. Numair was alarmed. Donatien wasn’t visibly more unwell than the last time they’d seen him, but there was something less about him. It was in his eyes, Numair thought. They were duller.

He thought restlessly of the opals.

“Never mind,” said Solange with a haughty shrug. “Then we’ll have no face paint for today. It’s a dire tradition anyway.”

Rain was frowning.

“Highnesses,” she said, kneeling briefly until Donatien flapped his hand at her, telling her to rise. “I must advise you, it _is_ tradition. Tradition has purpose.”

“Its purpose is to bog kingdoms down with fripperies,” snapped Solange, turning her head so she was partially tilted towards Rain’s voice. “It’s some paint and silliness, what does it matter?”

“Tradition soothes the people,” said Rain quietly. “And if I may be blunt, Majesty, some colour would serve you well.”

“Insolence,” muttered Donatien without heart, straightening like a widowed ash tree bowed by winds that had toppled its companions. He looked grimmer standing straight. It was like watching an anatomy skeleton on display stand upright and attempt to walk; one was left wondering where the muscles that powered it were hidden. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“She means we’ve seen healthier-looking corpses,” said Daine, staring hard at Donatien. “Why aren’t you dressed for the address?”

Constant turned worried eyes onto Numair, his expression beseeching. Numair didn’t know what was going on and thus was unable to offer advice.

Then, Constant’s gaze slipped past Numair and saw Bon Bon standing there.

They widened.

“What’s Bon Bon doing here?” he asked, leaping out of his chair and coming over to pat her. Daine and Numair exchanged sly glances, the odd atmosphere of the moment fading with the anticipation of surprise. “She looks so lovely! This bow is …”

He stopped, fingers loose on the silken bow.

Daine, voice tight with excitement, crouched beside him, touched her fingers to his, and said, “She wanted to look good for her first day being your girl.”

That proclamation took a moment to pop into being around them, but pop it did. Constant’s eyes went wider, and wider, and wider, until – with a cry like he’d been shot with an arrow, but in the best possible way – Constant realised what she meant. He flung himself into Daine’s arms, sideways and almost knocking himself out with a wayward elbow, yelling something that sounded like a hectic mash-up of, “Is she really mine?!” and “A dog!” and “She’s too good!” all muddled together. 

“Happy birthday,” said Daine, hugging him tight in return. She was smiling fit to bust.

Numair idled overhead, feeling out of place but unsure how to involve himself in the joy. Right when he’d just decided to simply loom and enjoy it, Constant tore himself up and leapt with equal enthusiasm at Numair. Numair found himself with an armful of boy babbling his love and thanks, and could do nothing but hold him tight and wish that all of life was as lovely as getting a perfect gift on one’s birthday.

“You’re absolutely welcome,” said Numair, giving into the hug and putting his all – every hug he’d never given his own siblings and all the wordless, complicated feelings he had tucked away about them – into the embrace. “A boy should always have something to love utterly.”

Constant pulled himself loose, eyes damp and smile liable to knock him sideways it was so huge.

“But I do,” he said damply, wiping his face with a gesture that was much nicer than the frenetic rubbing Donatien was doing of his red-raw eyes. “I do have those I love utterly. I love _you_ –” This was said to Daine as he swept her up again and kissed her cheek. “– and I love you –” This was to Don, who also got a kiss. Don returned the smile, kissing Constant back. Constant wheeled on Numair once more.

Numair, as always, got in first.

“I’m older than you,” he cut in, “which means I have more love to give. So you cannot possibly love me as much as I can love you.”

Constant, however, was unperturbed.

“You got me a _dog_ ,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’ll love you as much as I please, thank you very much. But I love _you_ the most.”

Briefly, there was a mad moment where Numair thought the boy had said that to him. Of course, he hadn’t. In front of all the people he’d just sidelined in favour of his newest and sweetest love, Constant flopped down and hugged Bon Bon tight, telling her how she was the most important and wonderful creature in his entire life. Bon Bon preened under the affection she so clearly thought she deserved.

“Poor Pippy,” said Numair.

Daine, under her breath, said, “She’s going to handle it better than you do.”

But Constant had stopped talking. He was staring past Daine, and his mouth was hanging open. He looked dumbfounded. 

Daine stiffened before she turned around. Numair looked too.

Savigny stood there, looking mildly guilty as he examined Constant and Bon Bon. “Ah,” he said, readjusting his grip around what he was holding. “I see someone got you a dog.”

Constant just kept staring.

Numair stared too.

“Oh no,” said Daine, covering her mouth. Numair suspected she was laughing through; it was in the shape of her eyes how delighted she was with this. “We forgot to tell _Sav_.”

It was Donatien who reacted first with a thrilled, “Baby!” that, once again, threw Numair for a loop as the king hurtled past with the enthusiasm of a much healthier man. It looked as though he was going for Savigny. Of course, his focus wasn’t at all on the humans; instead, he slid to a stop in front of Savigny – who eyed him unhappily – and held his arms out to take from Savigny the armful of white fluff he was holding. Savigny let him. 

The white fluff wiggled and sneezed, two tiny black eyes appearing within the depths of the fur. Two small rounded ears wiggled. Numair saw the barest suggestion of paws, he thought, though it was hard to tell what was paw and what was fluff.

“That’s a puppy,” said Constant in the kind of voice that suggested he’d ascended to some higher plane of being and left his earthly body behind.

“That’s a whole lot of _shedding_ ,” said Daine in the kind of voice that promised she was thinking ahead to what spring blow-outs of fur were going to look like with a sentient ball of cotton fluff loose in the estate.

“You’re _beautiful_ ,” crooned Donatien in the kind of voice that suggested he was deeply and irrevocably in love with the creature he was enthusiastically smooching. The puppy, or at least as much of it as Numair could see – was smooching him back, wiggling and squeaking and paddling at the air with its furry nubs. 

Savigny, his fine clothes covered in white dog fur, seemed lost for words.

“Whose dog is that?” came Constant’s small voice, so hopeful and cautious that Numair knew all thought had failed him at the concept of Savigny giving him such a nonsense scrap of a creature.

“Uh,” said Savigny, staring at Donatien. Donatien was now telling the puppy how he was going to enact laws about its little nose, name estates after the beauty of its wee pink belly, wage wars for its curled tail. The puppy seemed very pleased with all of this. “I mean, yours. I suppose. He’s yours, which means you have two dogs. How splendid.”

Constant burst into tears.

“Savvy,” said Donatien, transfixed by his new friend, “look at his _feet_. They’re so small! How does he go with such tiny _feet_?” 

He had the puppy’s paw pressed against his index finger and was waggling it, the puppy’s squeaking growing more enthusiastic at the attention.

Savigny stared down at his king for the longest, clearest moment of the last few months of Numair’s life. Numair watched, feeling anticipatory and overwhelmed all at once. He tried to imagine saying ‘Savvy’ in that breathless, familiar fashion and couldn’t. That was a word that was solely Donatien’s and Savigny’s, and no one else. 

And then Savigny reached to take the dog, his hands briefly settling over his king’s.

“Let’s give him to Constant,” he said with a confessional candour, his eyes never leaving Donatien’s. That smile still in place. It softened everything. “Come on.”

Donatien smiled back; it made him look much younger.

“As you wish, darling,” he said. Savigny took the puppy. Donatien let them go.

Numair exhaled. Shared history was a heavy burden. And Savigny was still in love with that man. Probably he always would be. This didn’t wholly upset Numair, beyond the uncertainty of Donatien’s surviving his reign and his erratic personality – Numair set aside the thought of how disparate a romance it was, where Savigny was given much less than he gave and certainly not as much as he deserved – as love, he’d found, was a replicative resource. He did wish life were kinder, though.

Life was kind right now. Crouched together, the mage and his king were giving Constant his puppy. Constant wasn’t saying a word. The small scrap of life his brother had bestowed upon him had rendered him quite mute. He cuddled the puppy close as the puppy struggled to reach up and wash his face with a tender tongue. Bon Bon, in turn, was trying to wash the puppy with her own much brisker attention. Then, the men stood and retreated, leaving Constant there with his inchoate pack of hounds. 

“Majesty,” Rain interrupted from where she’d been whispering with Daine. “It’s not my place but someone _must_. The people are uncertain and Beltane gives comfort. If you appear before them bare faced, they’re going to read arrogance into the act.”

“Isn’t it the right of a king to be arrogant?” snapped Donatien, though he looked more tired than angry. “The point is moot. We have no one familiar trained to apply the paint, and Solange will not tolerate a stranger against her skin.”

Solange, Numair noted, didn’t say anything to this. Her expression was furious, however.

Daine – and Constant, though only briefly before he looked back to his dogs – both glanced at Savigny. Donatien must have seen their attention shift because he too looked to Savigny. His expression fell.

“Ah,” he said, shoulders slumping.

Numair attended Savigny in his duties, mostly because Savigny asked him to but also because he was nosy. It fascinated, and saddened, him to see what became of past lovers. 

It also took him back to the king’s chambers. 

Solange sprawled onto the bed, giving Numair a flash of ankles he was startled to see on someone who seemed so decorous. She pulled a pillow over her face and declared for them to summon her when they were done with her brother. Amusingly, she also muttered that Donatien’s bedding smelled of ‘boy sweat’, fussily tossing the pillow aside and using her arm instead.

Before the mirrored dressing table, Donatien slouched atop his stool. He was watching Numair in the mirror as Savigny gathered his tools. Numair, aware of Donatien’s regard, attempted to put the man at ease, though what he dearly wanted to do was idle his way to the hearth and examine the opals he could see set into the fittings there. For now, as he watched Savigny sit upon the dresser with his legs askew, Donatien essentially tucked between his knees, he was wholly distracted. He watched with rampant fascination as a pot of a strange white paste was procured and set into Savigny’s lap, Savigny tossing a wet cloth to Donatien.

“Wipe your face,” said Savigny with impatience. “You’re oily.”

“You look lovely today, Donatien,” muttered the king, though he obeyed. “How lovely it is to see you. It’s been so long since we met each other with smiles.”

Savigny grunted. He had taken a glob of the paste from the pot and, without waiting for Donatien to express that he was ready, he began to apply it to the man with confident swipes of his fingers against skin. Donatien’s eyes kept flicking to examine Numair in the reflection of the angled side. Numair did his best to appear nondescript.

Savigny worked in silence. Numair managed to make his way to the hearth on the pretence of sitting on the stone lip. Despite this putting his back to the opals, he could – and did – probe them with his Gift. This told him very little, though he was extremely relieved to see that, either because Savigny wasn’t compromised by poison today or because he was very deliberately not looking in their direction, Savigny seemed unaffected by them. His attention remained on Donatien, his back carefully turned to the hearth.

Numair focused on the opals, reassured of Savigny’s safety. The same horrid feeling was in them as had been in the one Constant had had Rum fly away with the day of the assassins, but he couldn’t tell how they were influencing Donatien or what their purpose was. No one in the room now seemed affected by them.

Numair realised he’d let his eyes wander around the room, examining every item of furnishing very carefully. The wood the furnishings were built with was heavy and deeply grained, unfamiliar to him. There was a strange feeling he was somewhat aware of leaning against his Gift. Turning his attention to it made it fade, however. 

He wondered if Solange, with her curious Sight, could sense it too.

He looked back to Savigny and the king. Donatien’s eyes were closed as Savigny worked around them now. He was a startling sight, his skin having been painted a flat, matte white. Only now was Savigny adding to the canvas he’d created with shades along the bones of Donatien’s face.

“It’s strange having my whole face covered,” said Donatien suddenly, tilting his chin up towards Savigny’s face. Savigny’s expression didn’t change. He was mixing his paints with his smallest finger and seemed focused on that. “A whole king would only have half. Don’t you miss it?”

“No,” said Savigny shortly. 

Donatien stared hard at him, his eyes open. They were redder against the white of his face paint. There was a grim silence.

Numair watched as Savigny outlined Don’s mouth with delicate hints of off-white, sharpening the shape of him. Smoothing his thumb over the corner of his lip. Numair felt very odd about witnessing this. He leaned back and settled a hand against the stone, hiding his gesture with a yawn no one took notice of anyway. 

“You promised to stand beside me,” said Donatien, very quietly.

Numair stiffened, going cold at both the icy touch of the altered stone and the words, dredging up some terrible long-ago promise in his mind.

Savigny, reaching for a pot of black, said, “I was very different then. I was a boy making stupid promises.”

Solange, from the bed, said, “And now you’re a man who breaks them. I call that growth.”

“So do I,” snapped Savigny.

Donatien closed his eyes. He was silent for a long thought, before saying, “Those earrings are quite fine on you, Master Numair. They look like Herrington’s work. He’s a favourite of yours, is he not, Savigny?”

Savigny broke the lines of Donatien’s face with a savage, winged slash of black down the centre of it, giving the king an inhuman stare with the reddened whites of his eyes making the blue irises stand out like points of extreme cold. Numair stared at them in the mirror and hoped that what the man behind those eyes was feeling was nothing like the rage and fear he’d felt trapped within the opal he’d touched and now regretted touching.

Numair realised that Savigny was trembling, a contained anger simmering under his bland expression. He leaned close, blowing on a damp patch of paint as though to dry it faster so he could colour over it, now with a russet red that promised to settle to a dried-blood brown. 

“If you want people beside you, be _worthy_ of them,” he snapped.

None of them spoke again.

“Tell me about the painted masks the king and his sister wear,” Numair demanded of Daine when he found her sitting to the side of what was now a party in action. Constant was whirling around the crowded room greeting and being greeted by guests who fussed over him as he deserved. He was carrying his puppy with Bon Bon at his heels. Numair felt proud enough to bust just seeing how happy the boy was, surrounded by those who loved him. 

And here was Daine in the shadows.

Daine turned to look at where Donatien was sitting at the table set up for the higher royalty, alone in his corner with a wine glass before him and his expression impossible to read under the intricate design of his painted face. Where the guests were dressed to celebrate the beauty of Beltane, the king’s jagged whorls of black and red against that stark white paint made Numair think of the underside of a rock. Beltane on top was glory and fun; Beltane tipped over was a reminder that there was blood in birthing and that the Gallans cried loudest for a god who hunted. 

“Fire and thorns,” said Daine, nursing her serving of cider. “We celebrate Beltane with the flowers of thorn trees. Hawthorn, rose, briar. Flowers are new life, but thorns are pain caused and pain taken, and they’re important too.”

“But why the king?” pressed Numair, burning with curiosity.

Daine shrugged. Better answers would likely come from Savigny, but Numair made do. “Kings and Queens are like thorns,” was her indelicate answer. “They’re all pretty and purposeful for a kingdom because they make the bees come which causes growth, but they bite too. They’ll bite you just as easy if you’re tending them or cutting them. Guess Cría’s tendency to riot reminded them that sits up top that they should seem sorry for that sometimes. On Beltane, the monarch is thorns and fire. There’s an address where they’re cleansed.”

Numair was fascinated. He sat next to Daine and stole several of the rich pastries from her plate, enjoying them while she scowled at him. Now that she’d pointed it out, he could see where the strange designs breaking Donatien’s face into something bizarre and unsettling to look upon – made worse by how gaunt the man was, giving him an uncomfortably skeletal stare – were reminiscent of fire and thorns. It wasn’t an easy comparison though. Savigny was clearly skilled at shaping faces with paint, but he was no artist. They were suggestive only of their themes.

“Savigny used to get half painted,” added Daine. Numair leaned against her to settle more comfortably while he percolated his thoughts, feeling her sigh before adjusting to let him. “Since he was half Don’s rule and therefore half his sin, he took the weight too. Only rulers with no Gifts get their whole faces painted. That’s probably why he’s sulking up there – it mustn’t feel nice having Savigny’s leaving smeared on his face like that.”

Numair winced, fingering what was in his pocket. 

“The opals in the king’s chambers,” he said, lowering his voice, “I bound them before leaving the room. Whatever foul Gift they contain, I trapped it within. I’ll know if they’re tampered with, and I can likely tap into them to see who does the tampering. More importantly, they can’t influence anyone.”

Daine exhaled long and deep. Relief settled over her and, as he felt her relax, him too.

“Then he’s going to get better?” she asked, looking to Donatien with breathtaking hope in her expression. “He’ll get back to how he was, if you’re right in thinking the stones did it?”

“I don’t know,” said Numair. He couldn’t see Savigny anywhere, but Daine’s tentative optimism was contagious; he had no desire to sit on the sidelines and waste such a brilliant night. Atop the high table, a startling person had boldly approached Donatien and was now seated beside him, engaging him in conversation. Numair wondered what business Alianora Gaétansra, sister of Captain Rainary had with the king. He pushed the thought aside for now and stood, holding out his hand. “We’ll see soon enough, with Constant here to be our eyes. For now, shall we celebrate your brother?”

Daine stared at him.

“You do _know_ how to dance, don’t you?” added Numair with a sly smile.

“I’ve just realised something terrible,” she said without her expression changing, except maybe for that smile she never quite managed to hide when it crept into her eyes. “You’re _just_ like Savigny, aren’t you?”

Despite this savage accusation, she accepted his hand and Numair led her down into the dancers.

Numair was having the time of his life, being taught by Daine how to join in with the silly wheeling group dances outside the pavilion on the grass where the nobles mingled with off-duty staff and guards and Jewel commoners. Daine had had no interest with dancing with the nobles alone, which Numair was perfectly fine with. It was more fun out here. There were dancers tossing sticks of _flame_ to each other.

Also, Daine was letting him throw her.

Numair had practiced this move with several giggling women he didn’t know who’d found themselves passed to him during the complicated series of steps that ended in the smaller partner being thrown into the air and then caught. They’d all seemed appreciative of his height and none had broken any limbs, so he was feeling confident as he was passed from one man’s hands to another, realising that he was going to end up partnered with Daine for the next throwing bit. He didn’t know the specific term. He was just excited to be here.

But, as he whirled towards Daine and reached for her hand, delighted to see she was laughing as her partner blew her a kiss and let her go, disaster swept in. Disaster in the form of the delightful but currently unwanted Captain Rainary, who caught Numair’s extended hand and spun him away from his desired partner.

“Oh no!” cried Numair, seeing Daine burst out laughing at his face as she was swept up by a very dashing man with his face painted as a spotted hound. Then he realised his true danger. He looked at Rain as they followed the steps, her solidly but in a fashion that implied she knew them by rote and him enthusiastically but, even he admitted, somewhat erratically. He was taller. She was definitely stronger. “Who gets thrown now?”

“Where is Savigny?” she asked, ignoring his query. The dance was speeding up and it was taking all of Numair’s attention not to end up accidentally hurled from her hand into passers-by, which wasn’t quite the direction he was hoping to attain momentum in.

“I’m okay with being thrown if you think you can catch all of me,” he added with a charming smile. She was untouched by it. He withered under her stare. “I don’t know. I assumed he went looking for his brother. He vanished quite a while ago.”

“Some courtier you are,” she muttered, looking down at his feet. Her tone was scathing as she added, “You’re supposed to _stamp_.”

He stamped. There was no rhythm to his stamping but everyone was having such fun, he wanted to feel included. Rain seemed overwhelmed by his technique. 

Numair was quite excited when clapping was added to the steps. “Spectacular!” he exclaimed, joining in as much as he could when trying to coordinate his hands clapping with his feet stamping while also not losing Rain. “I can’t believe Savigny’s missing this!”

“Me neither,” said Rain. She was pulling the oddest face.

Numair suspected she was trying not to laugh and it wasn’t something she did often, so it was causing her some discomfort. He beamed at her or, at least, the flashes of her face he got as they eddied around each other. He was beginning to get dizzy. He hoped the song didn’t end suddenly; he’d probably be felled like an oak.

“We’re swapping again!” he noted.

Rain sighed, steering him with expert precision back towards Daine. Only now did he realise that there was a definite art to how those who knew the dance angled themselves, in order to end up with the partner they wanted. This was very flattering since, once he knew how it was done, he noticed that several dashing dancers were attempting to stamp his way. 

He was definitely taking _this_ dance back to Tortall. 

“When you find him, do tell him I desire to know what plots are being cooked up involving my sister and the king,” was Rain’s fierce goodbye, stalling Numair’s fun briefly.

“Wait, what?” he began to ask – but too late. He was turned and ejected from her partnership, towards Daine, who was … 

She was grinning wickedly. Numair frowned.

The music leapt.

Suddenly, he felt hands on his hips that briefly and _fantastically_ removed him from his earthly grounding, sending him into the air. He hollered with both panic and overwhelming excitement, only wondering once he was in the air just how he intended to land without buckling down the middle or shattering his ankles. He wasn’t really a man made for sudden excursions into the sky.

There was, he noted, a very large space being cleared for him despite him barely leaving the ground. No one trusted him to know how to land.

He landed!

“Spectacular!” he yelled, leaping back into the dance with a whoop. And there was Daine!

He reached for her, but she ducked his arm with a laugh and leapt into Rain’s, who spun her away. Numair couldn’t help but laugh, it was simply so planned. 

Someone caught him as he tripped slightly over his feet, dizzy. He turned.

“Oh, hello!” he yelled over the music, finding Constant beside him. “Rainary threw me!”

Constant’s eyes widened. “I want to be thrown!” he declared.

Numair looked at Constant. 

Constant looked at Numair.

And the music leapt again.

When he found Daine again, it was a wholly different dance he was learning, and this one far less successfully since he was attempting to do it with Constant atop his shoulders. Unfortunately, Constant at fifteen was all legs and elbows and Numair wasn’t made of muscle. Well, he was, but not in an adequate enough proportion to allow what they were trying.

High on excitement, they were trying anyway.

“One, two …” yelled Numair, bracing, “… three!”

The group of spectators they’d gathered all cheered as Constant scrambled onto Numair’s shoulders – supported by the hand of a stranger who looked like he wrangled carthorses for a living, so broad he was – and whooped as Numair briefly achieved a status reasonably close to ‘standing’.

The crowd groaned as Numair toppled, three of them ready to catch Constant as he fell giggling into their arms. No one caught Numair, though the ground was soft.

Bon Bon was there to frown at him though.

“Hush,” he said, patting her nose. “We’re having fun. Again!”

Up he went, ready to be very sore in the morning.

“This is brilliant,” Constant declared, getting ready to try again from his mounting block made of a stolen table Numair didn’t know the origin of. “Most fantastic birthday ever!”

It was almost dusk, and most of the dancers had vanished to go and help build the dozens of bonfires being erected across the wide sweeps of clear land surrounding. By the palace, others were beginning to clear space ready for the Beltane address, which would take place after dark.

“Don’t get used to it,” Numair warned Constant. “I’m never carrying you again. Your knees are bony.”

“I bet I can convince you otherwise if I ask nicely enough,” said Constant with a smile that Numair was sorry to admit probably would work just fine. “Sav! Hi!”

Numair turned, finding Savigny approaching with his eyebrows as high as they’d go.

“It’s been hours!” Numair complained, though still happily. “Where did you go! I’ve been dancing.”

“I knew you’d have fun without me,” said Savigny. “Daine?”

“Rain stole her,” said Constant. “Sav! Will you do the flower chain dances with us?”

“The what?” Numair asked.

He was briefly interrupted by Constant leaping onto him without warning, the crowd cheering as Numair – somehow – managed to stay upright, though mostly because the sudden weight sent him staggering forward into Savigny, who pushed him back upright with his hands. Numair found his face inches from the other man, draped over him with his brother’s weight pushing them into each other.

This lasted a moment, then all three of them toppled down into a pile.

Numair burst out laughing, his face mushed into Savigny’s shirt. Savigny had thrown one arm out to lessen his fall, but the other he’d tucked around them to stop them falling wildly. Constant seemed content to sit atop them and giggle until someone hauled him off, leaving Savigny and Numair momentarily alone.

Savigny peered up at Numair. “If I didn’t know you avoid drink, I’d think you were tipsy,” he accused Numair, though gently. “I’ve never seen you so silly.”

“It’s important to live in the moments that allow it.” Numair kissed the other man’s cheek, smiling against his skin before rolling off and standing. He helped Savigny up, rueful to realise that he’d crushed what he’d kept so carefully in his pocket all day. Now, he took it out and offered it to the other man. It was a simple flower. A small golden bud atop a thin stem, as small as a man’s fingernail. The stem was bent and the bud battered, but Savigny still took it into his possession as though it was precious.

“I’d have given it to you earlier, but you vanished,” said Numair. “A flower for acceptance. I thought you’d appreciate the simplicity of it.”

“I do,” said Savigny. There was a weight to these two words that hadn’t been there this morning. 

Numair drew the man aside, leaving Constant basking in the attention of his friends, of which everyone there seemed to be from noble to serving maid. It was privacy he sought, which took some searching. They ended up towards the palace, tucked into a nook between tree and palace wall, Savigny placing himself so he could look towards where the king would soon address his people.

“We should find Daine before the fires are lit,” Savigny said, eyes searching the grounds. Numair was warding them without gestures giving him away to sharpened eyes that watched the crowds for misuse of magic. “The flower chain dances are Constant’s favourites, and she’ll be looking to join him in them. They’re a celebration of family, of family here and family to come, and renewing broken ties.”

Numair could see why Constant, so afraid of losing all he’d clung to, would love that dance.

But, right now, he needed to say something.

“This morning in the king’s chambers,” said Numair, knowing his voice had lost all exuberance under the weight of what he was going to say, “Donatien said you promised to stay beside him, and implied you were less for breaking that promise. I wanted to say it then but it would have been rash, so I’m saying it now. Savigny, sometimes we leave people behind for a reason, even if it means breaking faith with them and with ourselves.”

“What would you know of breaking faith?” said Savigny with soft bitterness. “You’re all heart. I could no sooner imagine you betraying the trust of someone you love than I could Constant.”

“I loved a prince once,” said Numair.

Shock settled silently over their small corner of the day, Savigny’s attention finally and firmly latched onto Numair. It wasn’t a good attention. It made Numair feel itchy. He didn’t want to talk about this.

“Wh …” Savigny began, but halted. “That’s not important. Did he love you in return?”

Numair considered this. It was a complicated question. He answered as honestly as he could.

“I don’t know,” was the answer he chose. “I think he loved me as much as he knew how. Did he love me as I loved him? No, except that we were both terrible to each other. Him because he was cruel and sometimes thoughtless, because I was a possession to him, not a companion. Me … I let him be these things. I accepted his love in the shape that he gave it and allowed it to alter me. In the end, it ended horrendously. They always do, you know, those kinds of loves. I should have broken my promise to him sooner.”

Savigny looked down at his hand, where he held the small flower Numair had given him.

“We’ll never last, you and I,” he said, more to the flower than Numair. “You’re Tortallan and I am Gallan to my bones. I won’t leave my home. I will keep my secrets and you will keep yours. We’ll both desire others, because there’s no point lying and saying that I don’t still burn with wanting him, even if it’s foolish. Do you still long for your prince?”

Numair had a visceral response to this, tasting bile on the back of his tongue. Words clumsy around his suddenly salivating mouth, his entire body preparing for sickness or for hurt, he managed an ugly, “No. My prince is dead. Maybe he never existed and it was the illusion of a boy I fell in love with because I was too young to recognise how he was going to grow. Whatever he was, the person in his place now is a tyrant. I will never desire a tyrant.”

“You left him behind, then.”

Numair thought of his exile from Carthak, realising he was shivering. He still carried that flight with him, etched into his bones, his body coiled to flee again no matter how much time passed. He wondered if he’d ever forget how it felt to lose his entire world.

“In a manner of speaking,” he said carefully. “This is a lovely thing we’re doing, you and I. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to continue. But it’s a lovely and fleeting thing for all the reasons you said, and I don’t think either of us should continue without understanding that. Despite this, I think there’s something very important about loving wherever you can, as much as you can.”

“And if I’m not ready to leave behind the hope of him?” asked Savigny.

Numair was blunt. Cruel even. He hated it. But it had to be said.

“Don’t follow him where he’s going,” he warned. “I did. It almost ended in my death. When people like my prince, or yours, when they break … they take others with them. Try and alter his path, yes, but not by offering yourself as some tempting prize for doing what’s right. No lover in the world can alter a person if that person doesn’t desire to be altered.”

Savigny closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and asked, “How did it end with you and yours? Please. I want to know.”

Numair, with evergreen pain, said, “I represented someone he’d chosen not to be. In the rejection of the path I wanted him to take – the _right_ one – he had no choice but to reject me too. Tyrants rule through tyranny. Tyranny does not allow for temptation. He ordered my execution, the death of that temptation to do right. In every way that matters, that execution was carried out. Who I was, the name I was born under … somewhere between now and then, that boy died because his lover ordered it. Savigny, I look at you and see that boy, and I’m terrified one day the exact same thing is going to happen to you.”

“I’d like to be alone for a moment,” said Savigny, quiet and still in the falling light. “I need to think.”

“All you’ve been all day is alone,” said Numair gently, guessing – he suspected correctly – that Savigny had been circling his own brain since Donatien’s comment about Numair. 

“I know. Just … a few minutes to breathe. Then we’ll find Daine and Constant and we’ll dance together. I promise. Please?”

When said like that, Numair couldn’t say no. He brushed his fingers against Savigny’s and left him in the privacy of the tree’s embrace, intending to head back to Daine and Constant and assure them that the rest of the night would be nothing but celebration, together.

It was his sore back from carrying Constant earlier that betrayed the figure. It would have passed without note had Numair not stopped on the path to lean against a tree and whimper to himself, one hand to his aching side. His poor body was already protesting how he’d chosen to have fun tonight. As Numair allowed himself a moment to mourn his youthful vigour, he spotted someone walking with such unerring speed and purpose towards where Savigny was hidden that they must have spied upon them heading there.

Alarmed, Numair – glad now for his simple Tortallan finery instead of the intricacies of Gallan clothing – ducked back into a nearby tent, which appeared deserted as the inhabitants vanished to head over to where the address would be made and the fires lit. Here, among the props used in the owner’s entertainment routines, he stripped quickly and, with the ease of old habits, slipped into his hawk shape.

It was grim light for a hawk. Numair moved as swiftly as he could on clumsy talons before he could take to the air, coming in thankful for the gloom to hide his approach into the canopy of the tree above Savigny. Here, he found a perch and stayed there without moving, peering down at where Savigny was sitting on the grass, head in his hands and not making a sound. It was a terrible sight. Numair hated to see him so torn on a day that Daine had said he loved so much.

The figure unfolded from the shadows, walking across the grass. The last few glimmers of sunlight made the paint on his face gruesome. 

“Why are you following me?” asked Savigny without looking up.

Donatien stopped, lingering several feet from Savigny with his posture uncomfortable, his hands hanging awkwardly at his sides. “I wasn’t eavesdropping,” he said, which Numair didn’t worry about even if it was a lie. He’d warded them. “I was looking for you …”

“You’re going to be late. You speak to the people soon. I know they don’t matter to you, but you could at least pretend.”

This would have been much more cutting if Savigny had looked up from his knees to say it, Numair suspected. As it was, it was mumbled and slightly damp.

“I do care, I just.” Donatien shook his head, going to rub his eyes and stopping himself as he realised he’d smear the face paint. “Gah. Why is that every time I try to speak to you now it’s like I’m possessed by the ghost of my mother’s bitchiest self?”

Savigny’s head shot up and he stared, openly shocked, at Donatien. Numair tightened his talons on the branch, resisting the urge to scoff in bird.

“I’m shitty to you now and I’m sorry for that,” said Donatien, sounding so utterly different to any other time Numair had heard him that he knew there was no way the king knew he was there. “I just … we have a lot of resentment built up, I guess, and it makes it hard to be sensible around you when I just want to lash out and hurt you like I’ve been hurt. That’s terrible. I’m terrible. We can’t keep doing this.”

“We _aren’t_ doing this,” said Savigny firmly, standing up in a slow, tired way. “I’m going to dance with my brother. You’re going to address your people. We will be excellent to each other by staying far apart. I don’t need your apologies. Just your distance.”

“You’re going to dance with Numair, you mean,” said Donatien.

Savigny went still. Dangerous and cold, his eyes narrowed.

Hurriedly, Donatien added, “I didn’t mean that as condemnation. I’m … not happy for you. That would be a lie. I feel like I’m feeling approximately every emotion about the concept of you and that … mage.”

He said mage with seething dislike laced into every utterance.

“I am a mage,” said Savigny.

“I feel every emotion about you too,” was Donatien’s glib reply. It didn’t seem to amuse Savigny. “Still, hear me out, please. We cannot give each other distance. It’s untenable. Constant will be here and I won’t see you avoid your brother to hide from me, not when he needs you so. Besides, I miss Daine and I never see her when I can’t visit without fear of you swooping down from the rafters to batter at me. For the sake of those we love, let us put aside this fool notion of distance. I will try to be … better … in return.”

“No, you won’t,” said Savigny. “You say you will but you won’t because you don’t understand why I ask you to consider the impact of your decisions. Your actions, more than anyone else in this country, have consequences. Your decisions have consequences. You _directly_ impact an unimaginable amount of people every time you open your mouth, and I don’t understand why you struggle to understand that so much. If you’d just ride in the Bog as your mother used to, you’d see how –”

“My mother died in the Bog,” said Donatien, his voice like cut ice. 

Savigny faltered.

The pause in the conversation was horrendous. There was so much pain in it, and neither man knew how to walk that pain back towards some kind of comfort.

Stiffly, Donatien said, “Ossika said you fled the palace the other day, following the assassins. She says you are secretive. Untrustworthy.”

“Ossika lies,” Savigny replied. “I was ill. The blades were poisoned – you were cut too. You must know that since you would have sickened.”

Donatien’s reply was dire. He said, “I’m always ill. It’s a mind sickness. Cole says mother had it too. You know it. They used to say it was what ailed Daine, when her … problem … got bad.”

“And it never occurred to you that if we lied about Daine suffering it, perhaps they’re lying about you?” By Savigny’s voice, he hadn’t intended to say this and was quite surprised he’d had the courage. Now that he’d said it though, he charged ahead. “Numair says –”

“Do you love him?” asked Donatien.

Savigny spluttered to a halt. “ _That_ is unimportant. You should consider who you’re surrounded by and who in –”

“I _do_. Every day. Every day I wake up surrounded by those who would harm me, if I have slept at all for the worrying, and every night I lie awake and watch the shadows waiting for the one with the knife. Savigny, I do! I am constantly thinking of plots and treachery! I do _not_ want to discuss it now, and especially not with one who my advisors are increasingly concerned is a traitor to my reign. I know they are wrong. Do not waste my time with unnecessary denials. I want to know if you love the mage. The stranger, this Numair. Do you love him?”

Savigny made a furious noise, whirling to stride away. Donatien followed.

“Does he make you happy?” Donatien yelled after, Savigny faltering to a stop in his shock. “That’s all I came to ask. I mean, initially, I came to apologise for my behaviour this morning, but then I saw you were alone with him and I realised I couldn’t … intrude. Until he was gone. And now I want to know if you’re happy or, if you could be. Could you be?”

Savigny didn’t answer. He didn’t really seem able. Numair was no longer listening out of concern; this was pure nosiness, though he also didn’t think he could leave without his heavy hawk body making a sound in the tree.

Donatien was speaking again in the hole that Savigny’s silence was making.

“If he does, you should pursue that,” said Donatien, so stiff and unhappy that Numair knew he was savagely at odds with what his mouth was saying. Maybe he believed in it, but he hated that he did so. “We very rarely get happiness, people like us. It would be nice if at least one of us escaped that.”

“Ah,” said Savigny, coming to life finally. “Your marriage. Have you chosen a womb yet?”

“Don’t be crass. And I don’t know. Maybe. We’re … there are a lot of factions looking to control my bed and my heir.” Don finally gave in and rubbed his eyes; Numair saw Savigny flinch as the face paint was lost to the gesture. “I don’t know which of them to yield to. I don’t know which intend me harm. None intend me well. I don’t remember anyone who does.”

Savigny glanced up so fast that Numair almost thought, though not quite, that he’d imagined it. But it was unmissable. He’d glanced to Numair’s tree; he knew Numair was there. Perhaps that’s why his next words were as incautious as they were.

“Yield to none of them then,” he said bluntly, offering a bow to his king that was exactly as deep as he wanted it to be and not an iota more. “I’m sorry, but it’s time for me to see to my brother’s happiness. While your plight grieves me, it’s not mine. Fight your own battles, Don. I am not your sword anymore.”

Donatien nodded with resigned sorrow.

“I hope you’re as lovely beside Numair as you were beside me,” he said sadly.

“I don’t see how I could be,” was Savigny’s reply, “seeing as I walked behind you, not beside. Good night, Your Majesty. I look forward to your address.”

Savigny stopped just outside the nook of trees, holding his arm aloft. Numair took the hint. He flew to that offered arm and alighted as gently as he could.

“Lean in the direction of your clothes,” Savigny whispered to him in the guise of a hawk handler murmuring soothing things. Unlike a hawk handler, he touched his mouth to the top of Numair’s head in a soft, ghostly kiss. He’d never kissed Numair like that before. Voiceless in his hawk shape, Numair stared at him before doing as he was bidden and using his weight and beak to direct the man. “I envy this skill of yours. Tell me, can you teach me to assume the shape of a beast?”

Numair shrugged his wings at first and then, upon further thought, nodded. Savigny’s control was so fine, he was already halfway there. He was curious to know what animal the man would choose.

They entered the tent where Numair’s clothes were hidden and Numair was deposited gently on the floor. As he hopped to his undisturbed clothes, Savigny closed and roped the door shut. 

Numair felt wards go up. 

He changed back, turning to find Savigny watching him. The atmosphere was strange. Something bubbled below the skin of their silence.

Numair remembered he had human vocal cords again, kneeled as he was naked in a stranger’s tent. Savigny was breathing in a quick, short fashion.

“I can teach you the theory but you must make a construct yourself to alter your shape,” Numair said, his own heart suddenly racing without reason. It was something about the way Savigny was looking at him. “If you can do that, you can train your Gift to … what?”

He stood fast and went to Savigny, alarmed by the rapid tempo of the other man’s breathing and the racing pulse he found when he got there. Savigny was high on adrenaline, his entire being alive with it. He met Numair midway.

“I am a mage,” Savigny breathed, folding into Numair’s startled embrace and violently existing against him, his whole body persisting. “A _mage_. I am my own man, and my own mage. I don’t need him. My path is my own.”

His eyes were closed. His body coiled tight.

His Gift spilled out, rose pink, alive, wild, undefined, without pain. Numair stared as it lit the tent below their feet, bursting into the construction of a bed of coals that neither smoked nor burned. They stood atop a perfect replication of a bonfire’s final form but without injury, looking down into the pink soul of a dying flame.

Savigny hauled him close.

“Constant’s dance –” Numair briefly protested.

“Dance with me first,” Savigny requested, his Gift still alight. “It’s Beltane. Our coals burn down. We don’t need long to be fantastic, didn’t you say?”

Numair grinned despite himself. “I was hardly …” he began, but Savigny wasn’t done. He took Numair’s words, altered them and gave them heat, purpose, promise, with the intensity of his stare.

He said, “Make love where you can.”

So Numair did. 

Numair changed his mind about his favourite Gallan dance. It wasn’t the throwing dance after all. The flower chain dance, now _that_ was what he loved.

Constant’s puppy, still unnamed, had tired his little self out and thus Constant had put him down to bed in Don’s chambers, where he wouldn’t be disturbed. Bon Bon stayed by Constant, keeping an eye on him. Daine said the puppy was content in the motherly company of the fish ferrets, and so there was no puppy there when Numair joined the dance with the small family made of those who’d found and loved each other.

At first, Numair wasn’t involved. Though the dance took place all around him, he only had eyes for his people right now. In the glow of the bonfires, they renewed themselves. Baskets of long-stemmed flowers were handed out, people hurrying to create chains out of them which they then looped around their arms as the musicians began to play. 

As people finished their chains, they joined the dance. 

Numair stood to the side watching Savigny fix his loop of flowers around Constant’s wrist before taking his hand. He heard snippets of the soft conversation that passed between them – 

(you’ll love the palace in fall when the migratory birds fly over)

(but you’re not really mad at me for going, are you?)

– but it wasn’t for him to hear so he tried not to. He could tell what he needed to about the brothers just by the way Constant smiled at Savigny. Others he recognised had come to where they stood, seeking Constant, no doubt. Numair saw Elspeth and Adel with their hands looped together taking their place to the side of Savigny and Constant. Though he wasn’t dancing, Pech was visible watching his aunt and uncle from where he’d sprawled on the grass beside a bonfire, smoking. Bon Bon was lying with her nose on her paws, Eloise crouched beside her. Numair was startled to see Constant detach himself from Savigny briefly and run to Eloise – but not as surprised as Savigny was when Constant led her back and a new chain was quickly constructed, linking her to Constant’s other hand. She seemed embarrassed, but Savigny gave her a baffled but warm smile and she relaxed, minutely. 

If there was a pattern to the dance, Numair couldn’t see it from where he stood. He suspected there was. It seemed the trick was to add as many people to your chain from the initial two or three without breaking the fragile links. Adel linked to Eloise, who held Constant, who held Savigny. Elspeth, of course, held Adel. Pech could not be talked into joining. Numair spotted Rain looking troubled and alone, though no Daine or Nora. Savigny’s other hand was empty.

Numair stared at it, surrounded by music and the festive connections, tempted for a moment. 

But someone else got there first. 

Savigny looked surprised when he turned to find Donatien. His eyes briefly swept the crowd, settling on Numair and seeming regretful to find him out of easy linking distance. Then he looked back to Don, who had one hand linked to Solange and the other free.

Pech, when Numair glanced back to his fireside haunt, was gone.

The standoff over Savigny’s spare hand continued, annoying Constant who clearly wanted to dance. He was scolding them both. Finally, as Numair watched, Solange rolled her eyes and grabbed Savigny’s hand, twining her flower chain limply around his wrist. Savigny seemed resigned. He glanced to Numair and pulled a face.

Finally, Numair saw Nora, joining onto Donatien after she blew a kiss to Constant. Rain appeared by her side and a whispered argument came into play between the twins even as they fiddled with their flowered tethers. Numair was fascinated by the dynamics in play, that Rain, on one end, and Elspeth on the other might not have known each other from a sneeze, but still they were connected. 

And then a hand took his. He looked down.

“Oh, hello,” he said, smiling at Daine. “I love this tradition, by the way. Would you like to hold Rain’s hand? I’ll be the end man, if you would.”

Daine shook her head, offering him a rare, shy smile. “Actually, I was thinking maybe we could dance together,” she said, shocking him to his very soul. “You looked so hopeful before and then it didn’t happen.”

“But don’t you want …?” he asked, gesturing to her family.

She just shrugged. He didn’t argue.

He took her hand and let her show him the dance, just the two of them. It was, he thought later, one of his favourite memories of this night, her slight body against his and their hearts beating at the same tempo. It suited his greedy nature to have both her hands to hold instead of just one, and he was deeply touched by her gifting him her sole attention during a dance designed to forge connections.

When the music ended and Don and Solange vanished to prepare the address, Numair bent down the middle to whisper in her ear, “Thank you, magelet.”

To his eternal shock and delight – he blushed throughout – she turned her head and kissed the corner of his mouth.

“Don’t make me sorry for getting fond of you,” she warned him, still holding his hand. 

“I would _never_ ,” he promised.

The crowd was quiet. The dark was settled now, the clear sky above alight with stars and a moody half-moon. Donatien, backlit by the glow of the open doorways behind him on the balcony he stood upon, looked small and unhappy with the details of his form and face erased by the severe light. Numair stood shoulder to shoulder with Daine. He’d lost sight of Constant in the crush, though he thought he saw a glimmer of the boy’s hair beside Adel several rows of people away. Daine had managed to stick close to Numair, uneasy in such a crowd and appreciating how far back he could stand due to his height. Savigny had vanished again, which didn’t surprise Numair at all. For all that the man had taken a huge stride toward in seeking his own separate identity away from Donatien, Numair imagined watching his king stand up and speak of cleansing and rebirth and pain suffered and inflicted would perhaps be a little too raw right now.

In the end, the address was hardly anything Numair would consider inspiring or otherwise. Perhaps other monarchs did much more with the traditions they were given, but Don had no magical projections for his voice and no air, it seemed, to project his voice on his own. He seemed either unable or unwilling to make himself heard, despite Solange visibly goading him on from where she stood behind him. 

He simply hunkered beside the railing looking drawn and faded, and, Numair realised with a sick lurch, an easy target against the light.

Giving up on hearing whatever the man was trying to say, though increasingly Numair suspected Donatien was simply repeating what was being shown to him by an advisor slightly out of sight, Numair turned to Daine.

“This is disappointing,” he admitted. “I hoped for something more rousing after all the zest of the day.”

Daine wasn’t paying attention. She was looking around, gaze zipping from person to person. Numair did the same, though he couldn’t see anything that alarmed him. But her hand suddenly latched onto his, nails tight in his skin. Her palm was clammy. She gave him an uneasy, wide-eyed look, and he leaned down on the pretence of kissing her cheek, though his lips didn’t make contact.

She turned into him and whispered, her voice strained, “I don’t recognise any of the people surrounding us, and I _should_. At least some of them – but there’s too many people here, and not enough familiar ones.”

Cool alarm thrilled Numair awake. He laughed and straightened, looping his arm around her with easy affection and grinning when one of their neighbours looked to them.

“Let’s find your brother,” he said in his usual voice, weaving through the crowd. Now that he was paying attention, he noticed something; this crowd wasn’t acting as a crowd should. At any official address, there was boredom to be found. Children yawned and young men and women whispered. Adults stared off into the distance, thinking ahead or just dreaming. Humans fidgeted and coughed and muttered, turning the occupation of so much space by so many bodies into a susurration of human existence. This crowd wasn’t doing that.

This crowd was staring at Donatien with ineluctable attention. 

It was quiet enough to hear spring insects calling.

Numair spotted Constant through the unearthly crowd. Proving Numair’s thesis, despite Donatien being someone that Constant loved wholly, the boy was more focused on feeding Bon Bon treats from his pocket. Pech was lounging maybe an arm width away from them, struggling to light a cigar. There was perhaps eight metres between Constant and Numair.

“Numair,” breathed Daine, aware before he was of the crowd. It had shifted like a living creature, faces tilting up. Those faces, Numair realised with a gut drop that sickened him – they were all the same. He looked around and didn’t see a city. He saw nondescript features. Altered in the same way. Deliberately illusionary. 

He switched his vision and the crowd lit up. Every single one of those who stood taut and ready, faces tilted skyward to the ineffectual king that hunched above them, they were mages. They were all mages.

Donatien faltered. Numair wondered what he’d seen, but he saw the man straighten. 

Moments later, a voice broke the silence. It was a voice that didn’t need magical projection to overcome Donatien’s weak address, and the crowd rustled under the flow of it. It was just a single voice raised in a brisk, harsh chant. Not quite a song, though there was rhythm to it. Numair only picked out a single line – _no longer will we starve for the puppet king_ – before other voices overlapped it. It was deliberately discordant, from every corner of the field. The lines crashed together so it was impossible to hear a coherent whole, just the overall rage, the building anger. The mounting tension. Numair clung to Daine and tried to drag her those last few metres to Constant, but the crowd closed between him and his goal, swallowing all passage and sealing him into a writhing mass of humans. 

Magic flared and Numair yelled, briefly blinded. 

When his eyes cleared, he recoiled. The people hadn’t shed their illusions; they’d simply altered them. The crowd was now a mass of glowing red, their faces painted with the bloodied gleam of the mage marks the Crown threatened them with. It seemed as though, from where Numair stood, the painted faces outnumbered those who weren’t. The chanting was provocative. Single words kept lashing out of the diatribe of hate – vengeance, victorious; blood, battle; grief; rage; a refusal to be enslaved, to be hungry, to lay down and die – and panic was beginning to spill out with it. Numair could see people fighting to be free of the crush; he could hear screaming; he looked up and couldn’t see Donatien.

And then the sky tore open.

Numair flung himself down as most of the crowd did, even the mages. They must have known it was coming, especially as – Numair saw – many of them were helping to cast it. But the huge griffin construct, burning with all the flames of Beltane, was a terrific sight with emphasis on the terror of it. As a unit, they felt hunted and dived to the ground before their brains registered that the flame-wrought beast that screamed overhead as it swept above the crowd was a creature of magic not blood.

The chanting continued. Screams were beginning to rise above the chant as fear surmounted, and Numair saw guards pouring in. He remembered the Fair and felt sick; he remembered the Griffin Riots.

So, it seemed, did the mages.

The griffin dived like an arrow, standing rampant before a single guard who stared at it as though it was the Black God itself. The glow of it illuminated him in a ghastly light. And the griffin, with the voice of every chanting mage, screamed at the man. With a great gush of Gift, the griffin burst apart, peeling away until it was a fraction of its size. Simply a baby. 

In the silence that followed this, the illusion of the baby griffin let out a grieved chirp and collapsed before the man. There was an arrow in its skull. It stared at the guard with damning betrayal on its glimmering features.

It vanished.

The guards crashed down. 

It was all Numair could do to keep hold of Daine as he battled to get them both out of there. When they finally did break free, blessedly unharmed except for bruises and sick with fear for all their loved ones still somewhere within the mass, it was to the palace side of the mess. This put them in danger of being crushed against the wall if the tide of humanity changed direction, and Numair was so fixated on getting them away from that that he didn’t realise immediately that Daine was dragging on his sleeve.

When he realised, he switched his attention to her. She was pointing.

He looked.

“Constant!” he roared with no hope of being heard, seeing the boy break free from the crowd and – Bon Bon at his side – hurtle for the palace. Briefly, Numair was relieved as the boy vanished through the doors, which were surprisingly free of guards.

They were, he realised more clearly moments later, unguarded.

“He’s going for his puppy!” Daine screamed at him, her eyes huge with fear.

The puppy that was in Donatien’s chambers. The king’s chambers. This mess was eye-catching and all-encompassing. It had drawn every guard into it in a great mass of panic, household and palace alike. There were nobles trapped in the crush, nobles whose guards were desperate to reach them. And, if Numair had been an assassin, it was a perfect time to strike. 

“Get to safety!” he roared at Daine, aware that her following him would likely be equally as dangerous, if not more so, than her finding her own safe place. He trusted her to survive. She’d done an incredible job of it so far.

Whatever she saw on his face, she took it seriously. She broke and ran, and so did he. 

The only difference was that he was for the palace, and she away.

Numair didn’t see a single guard on his madcap sprint for Donatien’s chambers. He saw terrified staff and nobles who’d gotten inside and made for their idea of safety, and he even saw a few of those who hadn’t realised what the scream of noise outside was about. It had all happened so fast. No one stopped Numair’s bolt for the king though, as he wondered if Donatien would have run for his rooms – since he saw no sign of the king or his sister – and that was equally alarming.

He skidded into the hall leading up. Only once he was at the door leading in did he slow, casting his Gift out in a wave to get a feel for lay within. It told him very little. Only now did he realise how baffling the presence of the opals was to his Gift when he was outside of the rooms; all he got back was a buzzing feeling of nothingness when he should have, at the very least, picked up on the opals, his bindings upon them, and the anti-listening and fire-proofing spells he knew were worked deep into the walls inside, as he’d examined them when he’d been here prior. 

In the first room, he found nothing.

He strode through, Gift at the ready. The door to the fish ferret room was closed, though he didn’t know if that was to obscure danger or to keep inside inquisitive beasts and one small puppy. If Constant were here, he’d be in there.

Voices.

Numair froze. They were coming from Donatien’s bedroom. He considered sealing the room with them in it, as they were an unknown variable and he didn’t particularly feel like battling assassins today. He just wanted to know where Constant was. 

In the end, he decided he was likely a match for whatever stood upon the other side.

He hid himself, illusioned and silenced the door so they wouldn’t see it open – unless it hit them – and stepped into the king’s bedchambers.

Savigny stood upon the hearth with his back to the door, examining the opals. 

The relief that crashed into Numair was astounding. He almost crumpled under the weight of it. It was a very strange feeling, to be so very ready for a battle only to find the danger was false. 

He dropped the invisibility, stepped forward, and said, “Savigny.”

Savigny turned, examining Numair with his expression odd. His gaze slid past Numair, betraying that Numair had made an error of judgement as it lingered at a point just over his shoulder before snapping back to his face. Those wolf green eyes widened.

Numair turned, thrusting his Gift out –

– and time seemed to freeze. Numair felt like he was moving through molasses, his gaze locked forever on the dispassionate stare of the person who’d stood invisible to Numair’s eyes and Gift behind him as he’d entered. Numair’s heart slowed to a whisper. His blood dried up, barely flowing. His limbs were glacial. A second was an eternity, a minute unthinkable. It was years of staring at the black eyes watching from within the viciously beaked mask of the human, or creature, as Numair didn’t think he’d ever been trapped so effectively by a mortal being before. In the space of a breath, he’d lost all ability to function.

His gaze sharpened along with his fear in the brief moment before reality kicked back in and time began to move again. He noted the spike of fear he felt as he noticed the feathered raven mask and the stabbing beak that protruded. The human eyes watching him grossly from behind that disguise. The person was slender and calm, poised. A deep cowl obscured their hair and changed the shape of their form, giving them the appearance of wings folded tight about their body as it flowed smoothly into a heavy cloak. 

Numair toppled backwards. It was an unreal fall. It seemed to take forever, which only left more time for him to ponder how odd it was that he was letting himself tumble back without even attempting to protect the back of his skull. In fact, if the raven-masked person hadn’t stridden forward and caught him, he’d have surely dashed his senses out on the stone floor.

Everything was peculiar after that. Numair’s senses reported to him from far away. Sounds were muffled through ears stuffed with cotton wool and his eyes, open and unblinking, quickly dried in the air and became painful to see through. Since his head was bent painfully to the side, what he could see was mostly floor, the raven-masked human crouched beside him, and a bare snippet of Savigny against the hearth. Numair didn’t feel like he was lying down, however. He felt floaty. Unreal. He suspected that he’d become untethered from his body. Thus, it was not at all surprising to him when he saw Savigny step down from the hearth and out of his body, becoming Nonny. It seemed only natural in this new state of the world that one man could become another, and they had the same colour eyes.

The raven-mask bobbed into view, examining Numair’s face intently. Numair stared back because he couldn’t move to look away. His body belonged to something else now, not himself.

He dearly wished he could blink.

A finger daubed at his lips. It forced his mouth open. Something cool trickled in, feeling returning to an area he realised now had been the first to go completely numb. But it was a slow return.

Raven-mask leaned close again. Numair could smell the scent they wore. It did strange things to his muddled mind. Set off explosions of thought that battered at him from within, wanting to burst outward. He couldn’t attend to them, though some seeped through anyway.

“Give the king my love, Numair Salmalín,” the rebel mage he knew now was Raven said, her voice husky. “Make sure he knows that there’s no nest I can’t pillage. He _should_ fear his people. We create him.”

Numair’s eyes were trapped open. He could do nothing to defend himself against her. He thought he might have blinked, but when he was done blinking he was still paralysed on the floor with no hope of escape. Even the promise of release that had come with the trickle he’d been fed had faded. He could only watch.

He saw Constant dragged into the room by soldiers dressed in raven masks. He saw them throw the boy down against Numair, felt his fingers tugging at Numair’s clothes and arms, begging him to help. He saw the tears and the fear and the trust; there was so much trust in those eyes, that Numair would come vividly to life and save them. He felt, most of all, the reality of Constant’s warm body huddled to his side.

Savigny was next. They beat him near senseless and hauled him in broken. Numair couldn’t bear to look at what they’d done, though he didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t look away.

They caught Daine last, dragging her in collared and chained like a dog. She saw Numair and hauled against her chains trying to reach him. Begging him not to let them cage her. 

But there was nothing he could do, so they did. 


	26. Dream Devoured

Numair dreamed deliriously. 

The scene of brutality drained from him like an infectious ooze, leaving the memory of Savigny beaten and Constant cowering and Daine caged seared across his brain, a scarred thought. He’d return to it, he knew, in the days and weeks and years to come. 

He realised he was dreaming when the world dropped away, waking him on the road to Tortall. He was skinny and sickly and starving. He staggered upright. The sun burned overhead. His body protested his existence. He looked down and saw himself in the rags that remained of his Players clothes.

He woke and, since he woke, he walked. Tortall was a smudge ahead and he was horrified, completely, that he still had his whole journey before him. He’d thought it was over. He’d thought he had a home. 

He’d thought he didn’t need to walk anymore.

But he was awake, and alive, so he kept walking. There was no other option. All that lay behind him was Carthak and the ruins of Arram Draper. All that lay before him was hope.

He wept as he went.

Whatever corner of his brain he was trapped in, it was terrible. No matter how long Numair walked on that dreadful path to an uncertain future, cored out by exhaustion until he was nothing but a shambling semblance of a human being, it continued. And it was getting darker. Not in the natural way of night, either, but with creeping fingers of rot that stole the light from the world. Darkness seeped across the sky above him, the road below sloping downwards. Still, he walked. Eyes fixed forward. There was a tremendous sense of dread crushing him.

It would be wholly dark soon, he realised. His fingers cut half-moons into his dry palms. It would be dark everywhere. He was alone.

He stumbled.

“Daine,” he croaked, his voice as hoarse as a hundred years of disuse. Rusted right through. Again, louder, hoarser, “Daine!”

Silence. A hot, humid silence. 

“I’ve already done this,” Numair begged. “Don’t make me do it again.”

A huff behind him. Numair whirled.

The badger god stood there, looking around with his expression uneasy. Numair could only tell it was him by the vivid blaze of white on his face and body; the rest of him was incorporeal. He was fading as Numair watched.

“This isn’t right,” said the badger, his voice bleak. “I have no power here. Mage, I can’t pull you out. Whatever is doing this, it’s Divine.”

“It’s not real,” Numair said. He was trembling. Even his bones felt frightened. He’d never been so scared of an empty road before. 

“It’s realer than you think,” said the badger, fading further. “Take heart – everything ends. I’ll find you at the end of your way.”

He was gone.

Numair was alone.

And midnight fell around him.

“I am Numair Salmalín,” he said to himself as he walked. It felt like years had passed. He was cold now. He could no longer feel his feet, or his hands, and he walked with his eyes closed. There was no sleep. If he stopped, this dream would eat him. “I am Numair Salmalín. I am a black robe mage. I am walking to find my friends. I am walking to find Veralidaine Sarrasri, and Alanna of Trebond, and Savigny and Constant de Hartholm … I am walking for Tortall. I am walking for Galla. And I am almost at the end of the road.”

He was lying to himself, of course. He was good at that. There was nothing ahead but more road.

And a cry.

Numair’s eyes snapped open. They revealed the lonely dark, and the palest smudge of something moving ahead. That smudge gave him life. On numb feet, he sprinted forward. The soft sound of his thin leather soles on the packed earth was such a quiet noise, it made everything louder by comparison. 

He found his companion walking slow, his eyes fixed forward and arms hugged around his body. Numair drew up beside him and stared, stunned.

Despite the darkness, he could see clearly.

“Are you real or a part of this?” Numair asked Donatien, who fixed him with such an exhausted look Numair almost laid down right there and let the dream have him. “What _is_ this? A dream?”

“We dream back,” said Donatien with a glazed shudder. “Fear is forward. Have you seen the people yet?”

Numair looked around. They were still alone.

“No,” he said warily. Donatien’s arms tightened spasmodically around his thin body, fingers stark white against the stain of his shirt. “Where are the people?”

Slowly, Donatien unwrapped his arm and pointed. Numair looked where he gestured. 

The road ahead wasn’t empty anymore. Fire burned the horizon. A city aflame. 

For a brief, gruesome moment, Numair smelled hot flesh and choked on the sounds of screams. The dread returned; he could have sworn it was Corus, that Tortall was ruined. Then he realised it was Galla, it was Cría.

It was where his friends were.

He broke into a run, calling for Donatien to follow him. His mind was half wild with the terror of loss. “They’re your people!” he screamed, but Donatien just stared, and Numair left him behind. 

It didn’t take long at all to reach the fire. It went from an unholy glint on the horizon to a fully realised hellfire belching heat and death upon him faster than he’d have thought was possible.

Willingly, he plunged into the blaze – but before he could feel the skin on his body burning, before the pain reached him, the fire snapped out and he was left alone in the ruins of a once great city.

He froze. Grotesquely, he could still see the bones of Cría around him. This road, he realised, was the main one he’d taken to get to the fair. Though, now it was edged with the skeletal fingers of gutted buildings and paved with the dead. He stepped over burned bodies as he began to stagger up the roadway, disbelieving of how cold it could be when he’d expected fire. All around him, the tattered remains of a blackened Beltane. Dead flowers and crushed antler crowns.

If he could recognise this road, he could get to the Jewel. To Daine, and Constant.

And Savigny. 

So onward he went.

The estate was gone, burned to the ground. Only the palace stood.

Heartsore and sick right through, Numair found his way there. He was covered in ash by now, his skin turned grey. His lips tasted like charred flesh and bitter dust. He was breathing in the cremains of the people who hadn’t escaped before the fire, and he was too horrified to bear it. It seemed everyone in the world was gone and he was all that was left alive. 

He realised, as he limped through the shattered gates of the palace, that he was softly begging the badger to come back and save him. He didn’t want to see more.

Through the gates, he found those who remained.

Numair blinked, suddenly surrounded by people. None looked at him. They were all the same ashen colour, their eyes as dull as the king’s had been. Numair had to push to get through the mass of them. They were as docile as cattle, drugged by the shock of slaughter. They moved like cattle too, in a lifeless drift wherever they were driven. Numair saw a baby slip from a mother’s uncaring arms, vanishing below shuffling feet. He dived for the infant before it was crushed, but couldn’t find it – and was almost crushed himself as the tide of docility swept over him. 

This was the first time he tried to call for his Gift, only to find that there was no Gift here. No light, no Gift, no love … and, with a sick realisation, no gods either. A toddler sat down, staring without interest ahead as her parents walked on. No one stopped to pick her up and she was left behind. The old fell where they ran out of strength. Families splintered, nothing holding them together as their hearts beat alone. 

Numair, unable to exist in a world where love didn’t, fled. He ran for the palace, to the last place he’d seen his hope. But it was gone. While he’d been distracted by the people, the dream had changed again. The ruins of the city had been taken from him, leaving him with just the horror of the loveless living. They were on the road again, shambling together. 

For the first time ever, he wished he was alone. And instead of following them, he staggered to the edge of the road, looked over into infinite darkness, and let himself go.

Some part of him expected to wake now. The dream must be over. He’d given up.

But he opened his eyes still trapped.

“I am eaten,” he rasped, horrified. There was no escape. What had been done to him?

“Dream devoured,” agreed a voice. Numair jerked upright. Donatien was kneeling beside him, his back to Numair as he cupped his hands around a black dog’s muzzle. The dog was drinking from the king’s hands, making wet, greedy sounds as it slurped. Numair took a breath that felt easier than his last. The king and a dog were a comforting sight, a return to normality. The spell, or the drug, or whatever this was – he was certain now that they were releasing their grip on him.

“Are you actually the king?” he asked suspiciously.

Donatien didn’t look at him as he answered. “I am the prince of nowhere, the king of no one. I am despair, speaking evenly in a quiet voice. Is that what you want to know?”

Numair shuffled over, reaching to touch Donatien’s arm. In this place devoid of hope, he determined to be kind. “I want to know where I am,” he said firmly. “And I want to know why you’re here with me and not someone else.”

But Donatien wasn’t finished. He straightened, pulling his hands slightly away from the thirsty dog – and Numair jerked back with horror, realising that the king was drenched in blood, and his chest was caved open, and the black dog was feasting on his ruined heart.

“I am the great, wordless love of a grieving nation,” said Donatien, expression gaunt with unhappiness. “I am the empty road and this black hound. I am the King’s scream and I am the Goddess’s veiled face. I am the drowned, and the dead, and I am midnight.” 

He looked, again, at the dog.

He said, finally, in the softest voice imaginable, “I need help, Numair Salmalín. I need help to die. I imagine it would be beautiful, to be so at peace.”

Numair stared. He didn’t know what to say. He suspected this nightmare wanted him to flee, to give up again. It wanted him to be cruel. The suffocating sense of defeat that pressed down on them, the dark, showing him the lifeless city and the loveless people first before bringing him here, to kneel beside the king responsible for them. 

This place wanted Numair to hate this man. To hate his uselessness, his despair.

 _He’s pathetic,_ his brain whispered. _Weak. Look at everything he’s ruined._

“Don’t do that,” Numair said, standing. He reached down and took the king’s hands into his own, closing his grip warmly around the sticky remains of the man’s heart. Blood and spit and the snarl of the dog as its meal was taken from it; Numair ignored all these things and pulled the king up beside him, the two of them trembling together in the dark. “Listen to me – you don’t want to die. It’s not like you imagine.”

“Don’t be kind,” said Donatien. “I don’t deserve that.”

Numair said, “Everyone deserves kindness. It’s how people change.”

“Even me?”

Numair did something stupid. It was a nightmare world, created to traumatise him. There was no fathomable reason for what he did. Yet, he did it anyway.

He pulled Donatien against him, wrapping the hateful king of Galla in an embrace.

“Even you,” he promised. “Come on. There’s a long road ahead before we’re out.”

“Don’t let me go,” said Donatien into his chest, smaller than Numair had imagined he’d be. 

Numair didn’t.

Numair woke, a cold nose nudging his hand. Drowsily, he turned his head to find the badger sat beside him. They were still on the floor of the king’s bedroom, but someone had placed something soft below Numair’s head and a blanket had been dragged from the bed and draped across him. That someone was sitting beside Numair, eyes fixed on the door and a sword across his lap. He wasn’t moving. 

The badger’s magic glittered, the scene frozen in time.

 _– Good –_ said the badger, nudging him again. _– You’re awake. If you need to be ill, do so. Fearwood is insidious. It sets roots inside the people it captures, sickening them from the soul out. You need to purge it now or it will infect you fully, even once you’re away from it. –_

“I saw terrible things,” Numair said, beginning to tremble as the memories crowded. He could still taste ash …

 _– I know –_ said the badger. He spoke gently, which was worse than his snarl. _– I’m sorry. I would have helped you if I could, but it hides until noticed. Look now. It’s touched you. You’ll see it –_

Numair looked around the room. He adjusted his vision to see magic, his stomach jolting when he saw a creeping black twisted into the grain of the mantle and wound into the wood of the king’s bed. Wherever there were new fittings, new furniture, he could see it set in, built into the room. It was the same unnatural darkness that had overtaken him on the road. 

_– Taken from cursed groves in the Divine realms –_ said the badger unhappily. _– I’ve no notion of how it got here to lace the room of a mortal king. It could never be grown here. For one, it needs to infect a dreamwood tree before it can thrive, and only Gainel can sow those seeds. –_

“It’s parasitical?” Numair asked, looking down at himself. He could see the thinnest shades of the black in his hands as he flexed them, and the shadow of a knot at the core of his chest. 

The nausea hit then, though nothing came up as he retched. 

The badger hadn’t answered. When Numair opened his eyes, sicker for all that he hadn’t been able to purge himself, he found the god staring at the frozen shape of the king. Numair looked too.

“Oh _no_ ,” he breathed. The veins of black were all through Donatien, laced through him like swollen ropes of ivy. 

_– You were drugged to sleep –_ said the badger. _– Sleeping within the wood once is all it needs, though it won’t linger in you if you fight it. It only sets in where there’s no hope, and you are one who blazes with it. I would very much like to know which of us has decided to poison a human king with a Divine illness. Only an agent of Chaos, surely … –_

He trailed off, muzzle wrinkled.

“How do I help him?” Numair asked, despairing. “Can you take it out of him, like you did Savigny’s curse?”

The badger shook his great head, looking as sorry as a badger could. _– I cannot meddle with something planted by a Great God, and nor would I even if I could. –_

“Why is it even allowed to _exist_?” Numair snapped. “What possible purpose could the gods have with something so terrible?”

_– It is useful. Some use it to see ahead, though it is never clear about its warnings. It gives nightmares, certainly, but seeing the future is always terrible. It wouldn’t serve anyone if it made foresight kind. –_

That time, Numair did manage to be ill. His brain had latched onto the notion of the future he’d been shown becoming true, imagining a city burned and all those dead people. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be.

“Warnings from the gods,” he murmured, some memory sparking. “I’ve heard these warnings be … oh no. Solange. The portent she heard, Donatien parroted it in the nightmare. Was that Mithros? It’s not possible. How could _anything_ I saw be …”

But he was out of words. It was all too terrible.

“I saw Daine caged and Savigny beaten,” he said finally, turning his focus to smaller hurts than those that would crush him. “Was that part of the nightmare too?”

The badger sighed, looking old and tired for the first time since Numair had first seen him. It frightened Numair more than anything else.

 _– I hope not –_ said the badger. _– I would hate to see Weiryn’s daughter in a cage. But there is no blood in this room. No one fell here except you. –_

Numair digested that without comment. Daine was not going to be happy. He’d suspected, but confirmation was unkind.

_– I must go. There are those I must warn about this. I cannot touch the fearwood that remains in this room, so you must not allow anyone to sleep in here. –_

Numair looked at Donatien, whose mask of paint was smeared with sweat. He looked young and scared. His hand was thin where it held the sword. But, still, he held the sword. He was protecting Numair despite hating him, despite envying him, despite fearing him. Buried deep within him, under the fearwood’s touch, there was still a stubborn light of the man Savigny had loved. There must be. Numair couldn’t believe that Savigny would have loved him had Donatien always been hateful. Ozorne hadn’t been, not at the beginning. Only when Numair had failed to alter his path.

“How do I help him?” he asked, steeling himself for the unhappy answer. “There has to be a way to pull him out – a way to force him to fight it off. If we don’t help him, Galla will fall. I can’t see how it _wouldn’t_.”

But the badger surprised him. He didn’t say there was nothing to be done. 

He simply said _– If he cannot hope, surround him with those who can. –_

**END OF PART I**


	27. Lovers in the Lonely Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **PART II: When Raven Rides**
> 
> When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, “Come.” I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand.
> 
> **― Revelation 6:5** **–6**

Life settled surreptitiously around him, Numair not realising he’d fallen into something akin to being home until it had already swallowed him into its insidious comforts. The wide windows of his room were thrown open to welcome in the summer weather, Numair glad for the chance to air his mind during the sparse moments he looked up from his studies. The room was cooled by both his and Savigny’s magic, as he’d spent several hours at the beginning of the season teaching Sav to perfect cooling spells set into the furniture and fittings. 

Numair, at the crossroads of a thought, took the chance to stretch. He idled out of his chair, pondering how quickly things had changed in the state of Galla. This room, for example. Born from the Beltane riots, it had grown around their need for a space for Numair to work. At first, it had been a desk he could think at in private. Then Numair had begun delving into the history of Galla, and the Immortals which were increasingly harrying both Galla and Tortall as the weather warmed. This had created a need for books, and the following desire for shelves to hold them.

Now, he stood in a space lined thickly with shelves Sav had installed despite Numair’s protests that he could read them just as well if they were stored in crates. Those shelves groaned under the weight of books and scrolls and stacks of parchment, collected from every corner of Cría and beyond. The walls that were still visible had been decorated with Numair’s notes, and with a series of ghastly artworks he’d had requisitioned from Pech. 

They depicted what he’d seen in the fearwood. He refused to forget.

He stood before them now. He’d gone to the painter determined to describe what he’d seen in feverish detail, certain that the truth of his visions was hidden somewhere in the recollection. Pech, prideful enough that the challenge of recreating the torment of a frightening dreamscape had been alluring, had worked fastidiously to recreate the snippets of memory: the people upon the empty road, the sickly darkness, the burning city. And one, in particular, the one that Numair hadn’t requested and Savigny loathed, but which Pech seemed to have been exceptionally inspired by. That was the only reason Numair could fathom that the man would have sent it several weeks after the culmination of their sessions, the image distorted nightmarishly from what Numair remembered as Pech had taken the shape of his dream and shaped the horror in exquisite, decadent detail. The king, torn open and kneeling, offering his chest to the bared teeth of a hound the size of a griffin. For some reason, Pech had drawn a smile upon the king’s dazed face. 

Daine was fascinated by it. It turned Constant’s stomach. Savigny never spoke of it, but it made his eyes turn cold. Numair kept the painting on his desk, covered by debris until he chose to examine it. He never showed Savigny, not after the first time. 

He wondered what the smile meant.

A sound distracted him, Numair turning from the paintings to glance at the window-seat where Daine dozed in the breezes. Though this had been his private space, there was something about Numair that encouraged people to encroach upon him. Daine had claimed the window-seat she napped upon now as her own, though she was quiet enough that he didn’t mind. She read while tucked away there, books of wild magic and animals and, though she tried to hide this from him, anything she could find in his library on Weiryn, the God of the Hunt. 

Numair had told her about her parentage. She’d taken it better than expected, though she seemed to have tucked the knowledge down deep inside her, somewhere where she kept all her other hurts. For now, it would have to do that she didn’t blame him for discovering her parentage; her coming to terms with it, he assumed, would come with time.

Restless with his work – a disquietingly dense scroll on the mythology surrounding the Divine Realms – he left it where it lay and went to Savigny’s desk, an addition to the room he hadn’t noticed until he’d looked up from a report to Jon to realise there was less empty space around him than there had been a week before. It bothered him to think he could be so distracted he’d miss the chaos of moving furniture, but by then it was done and there was no voicing his complaints. Sav’s study had combined with his and they’d distracted each other with the work that he now leaned over: piles of parchments littered with Savigny’s slowly improving surveys of the anatomy of the common hare. In the centre of the desk, a barely shaped construct gleamed dully. Numair had locked it into a glass orb Sav had purchased for the purpose so that he wouldn’t have to begin again every time he set it down, as Numair had had to when he’d created his hawk. It wasn’t much yet. One day, it would be the physical rendition of the hare Savigny was drawing; one day, it would be the construct Savigny used to alter his body.

No matter how often Numair pestered him, Sav wouldn’t divulge why he’d chosen a hare to shapeshift into.

This greatly annoyed Numair. 

Numair returned to his desk, barely settled when a flicker of movement to his lower left caught his eye. He craned around, raising his eyebrows when he saw the three-panelled mirror he’d placed carefully where it was only visible to him flash once more. 

With a glance at Daine, who slept, he finger-signed ‘Not alone, stay silent’ below the cover of the desk. They knew he was in contact with Tortall; he didn’t desire to flaunt it at them.

To his shock, George appeared within the glass, grinning with his usual sleepy humour. A meeting with the Whisper Man himself must mean Numair was lucky indeed. There would be another person in the room with George; he couldn’t scry. 

‘Hello, lovely’ signed George, following up with the flat hand ‘stop’ meaning he’d ended his sentence. Numair liked these finger signs. He hoped to meet the clever birdie who’d helped George come up with them. There was room for improvement if one had a clever mind, and Numair was certain they’d have a very clever mind indeed.

‘Mother’ Numair signed back, hoping the slow shapes indicated the appropriate wry tone. ‘How fare the children?’

George confirmed that all was well at home, in no hurry, it appeared, to discuss what he was summoning Numair for. Perhaps he was lonely. 

‘And the cat?’ Numair asked.

George almost choked.

‘Absent’ he responded, only now frowning. ‘Need knowledge for search, stop. Time spare?’

Numair nodded, interest piqued. 

George held up a sketch, drawn crudely on cheap parchment. Numair stared at it, completely flummoxed. He knew no sign for this.

“The Dominion Jewel?” he murmured with a wary glance at Daine and a wish he’d muffled himself, though she was so close it would have been a tight ask. 

George shook his head. He signed ‘A second, stop. Report from –’

His last sign was cut off mid-shape, George vanishing from sight. Numair twitched with surprise as the mirror returned to reflecting himself – and Savigny, peering down with his expression mutely curious.

“How do you make the mirror obscure itself when others look upon it?” he asked as Numair turned to him, shocked that the man had managed to come into the room unnoticed. “There was no time for your companion to see me and sever the connection, and you didn’t notice me coming in.”

“I’m cautious,” Numair said despite all evidence to the contrary. He jabbed a finger at Sav, who smirked. “And I  _ would  _ have seen you come in. How did you do that?”

“Teach me the mirror trick and I’ll teach you mine,” said Sav, putting down the crate he was holding on the corner of the desk and dodging around it to come up behind Numair. Here, he curled his fingers along Numair’s jaw and encouraged him to lean back, Numair glaring up at him now upside-down.

Undeterred by the awkward angle, Sav kissed him affectionately. 

“What’s in the crate?” Numair asked, trying to wiggle away from Sav’s love so he could nosy into the books visible within it. Sav wouldn’t let him go, now fiddling with the ties on Numair’s shirt. With gentle reprobation, Numair said, “You’ve only been gone two weeks. You can’t have missed me this much.”

“I did,” said Sav, his eyes heated. “I do. Come to bed with me.”

It was mid-morning.

“How do you survive without me?” Numair said smugly. Sav tugged at him some more. “Sav, no, I can’t. I’m busy. And you smell like a horse.”

Sav, offended, pulled back. “You like it when I smell like a working gart,” he said, but Numair could tell he’d won because the fastidious man was looking down at himself.

“I do,” said Numair honestly. It was nice to smell human under all Savigny’s scents and perfumes. “But you don’t. Go wash. I’ll keep. Wait, don’t go yet.”

Savigny returned from where he’d been retreating at haste to the door, taking with him his travel-stained clothes and vague musty scent. Still at a distance, he glowered at Numair.

“May I look in the crate?” asked Numair hopefully.

“Obviously or I wouldn’t have put it on your desk. Scrolls from the university in Nieak, as requested, on the position of the Gift to the Crown. There’s a book on Carthak in there too, written by King Theore’s Gift some hundred years or so ago. I can’t imagine it will be useful.”

“All knowledge is useful,” said Numair from within the box, digging through his gifts excitedly. “And was your business successful?”

Sav was quiet for a moment.

Numair peeked up at him, finding him looking thoughtful. The university had been somewhere Savigny had been looking to recruit for his nascent network, though so far he hadn’t had much luck. 

“I have little to offer them in terms of protection,” said Savigny finally. “I suspect mine is a failed enterprise. Father left me nothing to work with.”

“He didn’t expect to die so soon, I assume,” said Numair.

“Then he was a fool. We should all expect to die.” Savigny looked to Daine. “She sleeps deeply. Is she ill?”

“She’s fine,” Numair reassured him. “She’s tired from healing practice.”

“She’s  _ healing?  _ I was only gone two weeks!”

“What can I say?” said Numair with no small amount of pride. “I’m curious  _ and  _ efficient.”

Though Numair tried his best to rekindle the connection with George once Sav had left to wash, the mirror remained blank. There would be no more to be learned from that today.

Constant came to dinner to celebrate his brother’s return. They’d become accustomed to Sav’s extended absences as he travelled seeking both his own eyes across Galla and information to please Numair’s voracious appetite. Still, it was a pleasure to see him given back to them, and Constant especially – though he was thriving in the palace, as Numair had suspected he would – missed having his brother around.

They were seated around a grand table that was small enough that it was an intimate meal. The windows were closed against a summer storm that had rolled in that afternoon, chasing Constant in with a wash of rain that even now his hair steamed from. Sadly, it had meant that he’d had to leave his puppy at the palace, loath to bring it out in this weather. Numair didn’t know why Bon Bon hadn’t come to dinner, as surely the spotted hound didn’t mind the wet. A fire had been built in the grand hearth and they dined on what, to Numair, felt like a feast considering how odd until recently their meals here had been. 

Savigny had brought his staff home; the kitchens were alive again.

Numair thanked the girl who served him his plate of venison and garlic-seared vegetables, noting that though the serving was generous and the food rich, the meat was gamey and the produce thin. Food shortages were beginning to hit the inner city, and Savigny shopped outside of the Jewel where he could. A certain inventiveness had been permeating their meals to obscure the poor quality. Numair didn’t complain. He’d known hunger. He was simply happy to be fed.

As he ate, he turned his attention to Daine and Savigny almost-but-not-quite arguing over what she’d finally decided to spend her allowance on. 

“If I can heal, I want to heal,” she was saying, something which Numair frowned at. She could heal, this was true. But it frayed her mind and left her keyed high and prone to fits of temper. He suspected this was to hide the fact that she found it hard to heal and keep her mind in itself at the same time, but she wouldn’t admit it to him because she was determined to make her own way. “We can say I’m a herbalist. No one will know. The animals didn’t ask to get turned out of their homes because their humans can’t feed them anymore.”

“They won’t turn their animals out if they get hungry,” said Sav with grim humour. “If they’re Bog hungry, they’ll just eat them. There’s a meal on anything, even a cat.”

Daine went dangerously still.

“If you  _ must  _ tempt fate, heal your animals here,” Sav continued. “Don’t leave the estates. They can’t arrest you on these grounds.”

Constant was quiet, picking at his vegetables. He chattered less now he’d been months at the palace, Numair had noticed, though it didn’t seem to be from unhappiness or lack of anything to say. He was just more aware of when he spoke, and why.

“They’ll probably try,” said Numair, who didn’t think it was a good idea for Daine to take two weeks of tempting her magic into healing mice and turn that into carousing around the Bog looking for lost beasties. But she was feeling bored and restless within the walls of the estate while the others were so busy, and he suspected this was also her lashing out at the information about her father. A way of regaining control over her shaken life. 

“They can’t,” said Sav. “Why do you think they never physically expelled me from the city during my exile? These estates are Hartholm land, not Cría, and not Alaire fief. I cannot be expelled from my own lands, and those same protections extend to anyone who resides here.”

“The palace guards wanted to arrest Numair the day he melted the courtyard,” said Constant.

“The palace guards are muzzled rats pretending to be terriers,” snapped Sav. “They wouldn’t know the law if it bit them on the tail. Whether it pleases me or not, while we live on these estates, we are protected by the same laws that have sheltered the delicate nobility for untold generations. The rich protect the rich, Constant. Has the palace not taught you that yet?”

A dreadful clap of thunder silenced the conversation, all glancing to the window to look up at the storm-whipped sky. Rain flung itself against the flattened cobblestones of the courtyard. The wind was tremendous. 

“Will the young lord be staying the night?” asked Savigny’s valet, lurking by the doorway. He seemed to be delighting in the return of the staff, even if only a quarter of the staff a house of this size would usually call for. “I’ll have a maid make up his bed-chamber.”

“We have maids now?” asked Constant, astounded. 

“We have one maid, and I think she’s technically a kitchen hand,” said Numair with a smile he hid. Sav’s return to the world he existed within was reluctant; he was still dragging his heels on the particulars. “She’s excellent with the horses too.”

“We hardly need more,” said Sav stiffly. “Are you staying?”

Constant shrugged, looking to Numair. Numair noticed that his hair was growing out, much longer than it had been and with a fringe that looked self-inflicted. His stare was expressive; Savigny pulled a face and dismissed the staff with a wave of his hand, their server – who was also their cook, and who did the washing when Daine or Numair didn’t – finishing topping up their mugs with a spiced milk-drink before vanishing. As the doors closed behind them, Numair warded the room. The staff knew they were mages and Numair knew Sav would never hire anyone who would betray them, but they still wouldn’t impose more knowledge upon them than was needed.

“Don’s doing much better,” Constant said, his tone guarded. 

Sav said nothing.

“So he did agree to leave the rooms then after you spoke to him about the – what was it?” Daine glanced to Numair, who sipped his drink before he answered, his grip clammy as he remembered the nightmare. 

“Fearwood, the badger called it. From the Divine Realms, though I can’t find any texts on it whatsoever.”

Savigny said nothing.

“He agreed,” said Constant. “I don’t know if he believes it’s the wood, though he has had the rooms sealed. I think he thinks the rebel did something.”

“Raven?” said Daine. “That’s possible, isn’t it? She threatened him. But he’s doing better so clearly it was something in the room.”

“If she got in then, maybe she got in before,” said Constant. “She might have been witching him this whole time. Maybe  _ she  _ put the fear in the wood or curses in the opals. The new rooms are working, anyway. He sleeps more now when I don’t think he was sleeping at all before, so he’s more alert. And he hasn’t had as many fits where he forgets who people are …”

He trailed off.

“But,” Numair pushed. He could hear it, even if Constant hadn’t voiced it.

“He’s still not himself,” said Constant uncomfortably. “He barely eats. He  _ sleeps _ , yeah, but he sleeps so much … I think he’s still sick. Something is still getting him. Cole’s –”

Sav’s eyes widened, his gaze stitching to Numair and latching on tight, furiously green.

“– not there so he can’t be spelling the new room, if we still suspect him. Ossika doesn’t have the Gift for nasty curses, so far as Rain or Pech know. She’s just a healer, and not even that anymore because she and Cole took vows of abstinence from their Gifts and she wears the paint to mark her as reformed. So she’s not doing it. It must be Raven, it  _ must _ .”

“And has His Majesty come any closer to catching her?” asked Sav. Numair groaned. That tone didn’t bode well for Sav’s mood. It was one snap away from a wolf’s snarl.

“Not for lack of trying,” answered Constant. “He’s … fixated. He thinks if we can catch Raven, we’ll find that she’s responsible for it all. Then maybe once she’s gone we can correct what’s gone wrong between humans and mage –”

“Mages are humans,” Numair correctly gently. Savigny’s grip on his mug was threatening to shatter it. 

“I know,” Constant stressed, a shrill catch to his voice exposing his strain, “I was just –”

“Using their language,” said Savigny. “Will you stick your nose up at the people too, soon enough? Eat the food that fattens us rich while peasants starve, or help us sharpen the knives –”

“Enough.” Numair let no argument be brooked. His sharp snap closed Savigny’s mouth, if not the spite in his stare, and Constant didn’t speak either. “We’re allies here. Act –”

But Savigny stood and left, stepping through Numair’s wards as though they weren’t there and slamming the door behind him.

Numair sighed.

To his surprise, it was Daine who spoke first, who usually stayed out of the brothers’ spats.

“He’s tired,” she said to Constant. “It shook him bad, Numair getting bagged by Raven like that, and I think he’s been chasing his tail ever since trying to stop her getting so close again. Here we were thinking our big scary mage is untouchable.”

She smiled wanly at Numair, who shook his head.

“None of us are untouchable,” he said with grim honesty. “I allowed an illusion to fool me and paid the price. It could have been higher. The king could have found me dead, not paralysed, or the images of you all in trouble could have been realised. For whatever reason, the rebel chose mercy – and we need to keep that in mind. Right now, we don’t know what she wants, or how she intends to get it. Constant, Daine’s right. Sav is exhausted. That doesn’t excuse his temper, but do keep it in mind. He’s trying to stay ten steps ahead of a foe we can’t see, can’t predict, and can’t stop.”

Constant surprised Numair then. He said, “Yeah, I know. I’ll talk to him when he’s calmed down. Daine, can we go see your horse? I haven’t met her yet, and I’m sure Numair wants to return to his work.”

Daine agreed, both of them tidying their empty plates and heading out to fetch rainwear. It was an astute decision on Constant’s behalf, the boy who just three months prior would have sulked and glowered; he was giving Numair the space to see Savigny first. 

Numair took Savigny’s half-empty plate up with him, aware that Sav hated the waste of food. He found Sav slouched behind his desk, staring at the banked fireplace. He was silent except for a soft murmur of thanks as Numair sat upon the desk, pushing aside the magically locked box that contained the fire opal Constant’s bird had stolen and the bottled curse work Numair had pulled from Rain. Numair had been studying them both to discern their secrets, though neither had given up anything he didn’t already know.

“He’s lying,” said Sav, tone regretful.

“Constant? I don’t think he knows how to lie.”

Sav winced. “True. He’s obscuring then. He’s hinting that Don is ill still, but he’s avoiding committing to it. And he didn’t bring his dog.”

“Earnest would melt if you got him wet in this,” Numair joked, gesturing to the rain. It earned the tiniest smile, which was better than nothing. 

“Perhaps, but he takes Bon Bon everywhere with him, if he doesn’t take his eagle too. Perhaps the storm kept his puppy and his eagle safe at the palace, but the hound should be here. If she isn’t, that’s because he’s left her with Don, I guarantee it. And why else except that he’s nervous of leaving him alone?”

Numair said, “That’s a reach,” as he shuffled along the desk and laid his hand on Savigny’s shoulder, his heart breaking as the man turned into him and leaned his head against Numair’s thigh. He looked exhausted, tense all through and close to burn-out. He couldn’t keep this pace up for much longer. They needed a breakthrough, and soon.

“I know my brother,” said Sav miserably into Numair’s thigh. “It’s what I would do, were I worried for you and couldn’t be by your side. I would ensure you were never alone.”

Numair examined him in the quiet that was bordered by the vicious sound of the storm outside raising its temper. A real test of the new stable’s workmanship, indeed. 

“What are you mulling over?” he asked. “You may know your brother, but I know  _ you.  _ You’re trying to think yourself into something, I can tell. You hate feeling useless.”

“The network isn’t working,” said Savigny. His gaze flickered up and caught Numair’s, mouth pulled tight; his fingers stroked along Numair’s leg, absently. No real thought to the touch but just for the pleasure. “Maybe I was a fool to fight for it so long. If I do find those who agree to take coin for information, I lose them shortly after. Ill luck dogs my path, and, with every failure, I’m more likely to come to unpleasant attention. I think – I  _ know  _ – it’s time to stop hiding in the shadows. Don knows he’s being manipulated now. He knows he’s in danger. If we’re to navigate the winter coming, he needs to at least give the appearance of being strong, if not the reality.”

Numair almost cried out with the frustration of it. They’d fought so hard to return Savigny’s dignity and his sense of self; it was the hardest thing he’d done in some time to have to sit here and consider undoing it all for the sake of their homes.

“If you return to him as his Gift, you’re implicitly supporting his decisions,” he said with resignation. 

“I know,” replied Savigny. “But at least then I can make sure they’re  _ his  _ decisions and not the decisions of those who manipulate him. Numair, I should have never left. I did this.”

“You didn’t,” said Numair, despairing. 

“I did. I left him alone. We are vulnerable alone, and our enemies rejoiced in my actions. I need to undo that harm. Perhaps this time will be different.”

It was Numair’s turn to sound tempestuous as he said, “I can’t see how it will be.”

“This time,” said Savigny, touching his fingers to Numair’s jaw, “I’m not alone either.”

Numair woke from a nightmare, secure in the knowledge that he’d wake again. He must have made a noise, or many noises, because there was a warm hand draped across his heart. He could feel Sav’s lashes brushing his throat when he blinked. Savigny was awake and huddled close. Numair’s heart was beating a rapid tempo between them, his skin sticky with the sweat of being so close to another human in the tepid heat of the night.

“I’m awake,” Numair said groggily, stirring loose from his lover’s grip as he tried to cool down. He felt humid, disorientated. Every time he blinked, he felt like he could see whispers of the fearwood road looming ahead of him in the watchful shadows. 

Savigny, his voice aggrieved, murmured, “She never meant to do this to you.”

Numair snapped awake, alarmed by how guilty Savigny sounded.

“Hey,” he said fiercely. “Do you need me to get Daine to shake you out of this?  _ Stop  _ blaming yourself for not being able to be in a dozen places at once. You can’t carry the guilt of everyone’s pain on your shoulders, Sav, not on that thin frame of yours. You’ll buckle down the middle.”

Savigny went to answer, but there was a flash of white so blinding it caught them both by surprise. They froze, staring at each other – and then, with a colossal howl of rage and rattling the sky above them, the storm dropped with all the pent-up power of a mountain summer on top of them. The shudder of the thunderclap had barely faded from the stricken home when there was a follow-up scream of tortured wood, Savigny rolling out of bed with a holler as they felt something below them shudder awake.

“Earth shake?” Numair yelled, plunging his awareness down below the earth using his Gift. It went easy. Too easy.

He realised he was following a path he’d followed before.

He was following a path he’d made.

“Get everyone out!” he roared, not even bothering with clothes as he launched towards the window. “It’s coming down!”

With a frantic glance at him as Numair flung himself out of the window and into the storm, Savigny obeyed. But Numair didn’t have time for that. He caught himself mid-air and carried himself swiftly to the ground, needing contact with the earth if he was going to undo what had been done. Littered under the estate he could feel gaping voids within the earth, some cold and still to his Gift; some still raw with the explosive force he’d poured into them all those months ago while saving Constant. The passage of time combined with the weight of the city above and the strain of stormwater gushing down, eroding rock and dirt, was pulling the earth itself inward.

If Numair didn’t stop it, there’d be nothing left of Savigny’s home except a sinkhole.

He planted his feet in the mud, closed his eyes, and dived.

It was Daine standing over him when he opened his eyes. He was trembling with cold, the rain lessened to a slow mizzle around him. Daine had her gaze locked on his face. He tried to speak and squawked, tipping his head back and opening his mouth to let the water trickle down his parched throat.

“You could have this whole place plucked off this mountain, couldn’t you?” asked Daine.

Numair croaked a thin response.

Daine seemed unperturbed. “Doesn’t seem right, one person having all that power and the rest of us just having to trust you’ve got a kind heart.”

“Don’t need to trust,” Numair managed thickly, testing his muscles and realising he’d had his knees locked for so long he may actually end up in the muck if he tried to move. “Every day, I make sure to be kind. I earn my power. I won’t be a battlemage.”

He swayed, Daine stepping forward to catch him as he toppled. Grateful, he wound himself over her shoulder and they took a few cautious steps as his muscles returned to business.

“How do we know until you’ve been tested though?” asked Daine uneasily. “Maybe there’s a temptation out there that’ll make you move people like you just moved that rock.”

“I’ve been tested,” Numair answered. Finally, he looked up. The house was whole, or at least as far as he could tell. He was too tired to reach down to see what the caverns below the estate were like. “Is the whole building intact?”

Daine grinned, her unease vanishing. She didn’t answer; she just carried his weight until he could walk, and then she walked beside him until they got where they were going.

“Oh dear,” said Numair as they came up to where Constant stood, open-mouthed. The staff lingered. Some were in the wreckage of the east wing, helping Sav poke at the shattered structure. It had bowed quite neatly down the middle, dropping into the hole that had opened below it like a great, hungry mouth. Numair left Daine with Constant and hurried into the building as quickly as his stiff muscles would take him.

The maid, who was swinging a door back and forth on its frame, looked at him and choked on a laugh. Numair was almost too weary to ask what she was laughing at until Sav glanced at him and raised an eyebrow. He was dressed in only his breeches, bare feet vulnerable to the debris; Numair was in even less.

“A coat, sir,” said the valet, offering Numair his own. Numair accepted it. He didn’t have a choice. It was cold, and the woman was judging him with her eyes. He thanked him, then turned to Savigny as he pulled it on and cinched it around the waist, glad that it fell below his knees.

“I feel obscene,” he muttered to Savigny, who wasn’t listening. “Sav? I’m sorry. I tried my best, but it was going down fast and I had to focus on the half with people in it.”

“What? Oh.” Sav shrugged. “I was warned this wing was coming down. It’s my fault for not having it assessed earlier, and we’re lucky we had you here to stop it ripping us all down with it. Numair, look at this.”

Numair crouched to look into the drop that Savigny was looking at, knowing the maid behind him was tittering. There was little he could do about it. He’d given up dignity when he’d thrown himself naked out a window. 

“It’s a hole,” he observed observantly. 

“Look at the rain,” murmured Sav. Numair looked. He couldn’t see anything, though that was probably because he was exhausted from shuttling rock. Savigny held his hand out and a burst of his Gift, brilliant and alive, flared to light the wreckage. Everyone watching fell quiet as it lit up the soft rain, outlining every drop as a pinpoint of glittering light. Some of the rain drifted rather than fell, blown back as though the mountain itself was breathing.

“There’s airflow down there,” Numair said, stunned. He leaned further into the gap, Savigny catching his shoulder. “Passages? There must be. A single source of air would have expelled all its air at once. That implies continuous flow.”

They both looked down, Savigny’s grip on Numair’s shoulder tight.

“My father must have known about this,” he said softly. “He must have. These are his lands, our family’s lands. And if he knew …”

“Access to below the city? To somewhere else?” Numair felt like they’d fallen into some private language in the rush of their realisation, speaking with only clipped words and meaningful glances. 

“We never found his papers,” Savigny agreed.

Numair stood. From his shoulder, Sav’s hand drifted down to brush his fingers. 

Then Numair turned to the small crowd gathered. “Don’t follow us,” he warned them, closing his hand around Savigny’s. “We’re mages – we won’t get lost. Anyone else may.”

With that, he stepped forward and pulled Savigny with him, the two of them drifting gently down into the wet, lonely earth.

“Wait,” said Numair.

Something lurked ahead. They were in dank, narrow tunnels lined with ragged rock. Numair went first, testing with his Gift as Savigny lit the space around them with the brilliant glow of his fistful of mage-light. Whatever lingered ahead, it felt like old magic. It didn’t feel alive.

They hadn’t been walking long. The rock was cold under their bare feet. Fog drifted as they breathed. They were over-stimulated by the potential for a breakthrough after the long months of grasping at nothing. To think that down here, in these pockets of stone Numair had shaken free, there might be something that could give Sav the power he needed to save his home. 

They took a step and the light snuffed out.

Sav hissed from somewhere behind Numair, who’d frozen. The darkness was so absolute he had no sense of distance, of space, of where Savigny was in relation to him. It was an eerie darkness. Numair had the unreal feeling that if he took a step forward he’d find out that there was no ground at all, just this caliginous darkness forever until the end of the world.

“I can’t bring it back,” came Savigny’s voice, impossibly calm. Numair couldn’t move. “Numair.  _ Numair. _ ”

“Yes?” rasped Numair. He turned, though it felt like it might tip him into oblivion, and groped blindly for the wall, for a landmark, for Sav –

A hand found his, pulling him into the welcome embrace of another living being. They huddled close, their breathing so loud Numair worried it might have the power to bring everything crashing down.

“Can you make a light?” Sav asked him.

Numair shook his head and then realised there was no point to that. “No. I can light every candle in the vicinity – violently – or I can light none at all. No in-between. I think we triggered something your father deliberately left here.”

“You think it’s his?”

Numair pondered it. It was certainly disorientating. It would take a dedicated spy indeed to walk willingly into the unknown like that.

“I don’t think it’s malevolent. If it is … we can likely deal with it. How badly do you want to continue?”

Sav breathed warmly, shoulder tapped to Numair’s chest. They stood together.

He said, “More than anything. I  _ need  _ this.”

“Then we continue,” said Numair, walking bravely onwards into the dark with only the hand of his lover to hold him.

They talked to break the gloomy silence of their adventure. 

“You seem more afraid now,” Sav said to Numair as they felt their way around a corner, Numair wincing as he kicked something that clattered. “Ever since Raven, it’s like there’s this fear knotted up inside you. I can’t handle it. I feel like I’m responsible. Or that one day I’m going to come home and you’re going to be like Don, just this … puddle of fear and unhappiness.”

“I refuse to keep telling you how silly that is. You’re smart enough I shouldn’t need to.” Numair looked around. His hand was clammy in Savigny’s grip, but neither was letting go. “To be fair, I think my discomfort right now has far more to do with when I was trapped as a hawk. Ever since then absolute darkness as a concept has made me uneasy, which I think is perfectly sensible.”

“Into the black,” Sav said quietly. Numair stopped again, going to look at him but realising he didn’t know where Sav’s eyeline was, even though the man had just walked into him. Sav explained, “That’s what Daine used to call it when she’d lose control. Like she was sliding into the black.”

Numair thought back to his hawk days.

“That’s a good name for it,” he said with a shiver.

They walked on. 

“The fear in you is in Don too, isn’t it?” Sav asked after some time had passed, though Numair doubted it was as long as it felt. 

“Yes,” said Numair. “It does seem to have a long-lasting effect.”

He felt rather than saw Sav looking at him, the plaintiveness he knew must be there. 

“I think it’s possible,” said Numair cautiously, “that Don was influenced by the fearwood and the fascinators combined, to be the man who acts so recklessly, so fearfully. That’s what you want me to say right now, and it’s what I suspect may have occurred, but I don’t think you find it as promising as I do.”

“How could I?” said Sav. There was bitterness lacing his tongue. His breathing was damp and heavy. “That means someone  _ dared  _ to attack him, to attack his mind, and I – his Gift – allowed it to happen. I didn’t protect him. I didn’t protect you. I’ve never protected Daine. I hurt Con –”

Numair stumbled and swore, Savigny halting as he waited him out. Numair wheeled on him. 

“You weren’t even in the room,” he snapped, furious. “How could you have stopped Rav –”

“I led her there,” was Sav’s miserable reply. Numair stopped; it all clicked together. Why the assassin, Nonny, had taken Sav’s shape to move through the palace; why Sav had been so eager to travel and flee the guilt of Numair’s nightmares ever since; why he resisted returning to the palace even though they’d found the magical cause of Don’s torment; why he always returned laden with gifts and distractions. 

He’d led Raven up there. 

“How far away were you when she drugged me?” Numair asked, stunned. Sav tried to tug his hand away, but Numair held on. If they let go now, Sav would never believe he wanted to hold on again.

“Close enough.” Sav sagged, giving up. Numair didn’t let him crumple wholly though; he stepped forward and embraced the man, despite his reeling brain. “I … I thought you’d be fine, I thought she gave you the antidote, and I knew Don would find you and protect you from harm, whatever his feelings about mages. I didn’t  _ know _ , Numair. I promise I didn’t know about the cursed wood!”

Numair asked, “Why?”

“I told you,” was Sav’s response, his voice dull. “She’s more dangerous to me than you could ever understand. I can’t escape her, Numair. I can only work with her. Is that light?”

Numair turned again, his heart giving a great gallop when he saw a glint up ahead. They hurried towards it, the shock of this information passing over them as their mission surmounted. 

It was a doorway lined with magically infused rock. Numair probed it and found no nasties and no traps waiting, leading the way as he ducked through into the frigid, moribund air of a catacomb. He found walls of bones lined with grinning skulls, empty sockets daring them to keep going. A tiled path led through. It was lit by rocks that gleamed with sporadic light, but Savigny called forth his ball of mage light once more. The magic set into the passage to stop them from pushing back the shadows was gone.

“Savigny,” Numair said before they kept walking. “You do know that I’ll protect you from her, don’t you? I told Daine that I’d stand between her and a god if she asked it of me. I don’t even need to be asked to stand between you and an overgrown carrion bird like Raven.”

Savigny stared at him for so long Numair thought he was going to have to speak again but, finally, the shaded blade of a tiny smile appeared on the other man.

“I must say,” he said, his strained voice betraying how shaken he still was, “that would have been a much prettier proclamation if I didn’t know you weren’t wearing pants under that coat.”

Numair gave up; it seemed no one in Galla had  _ any  _ romance in their souls.

At the end of their path was a room. The air was old. It hadn’t been breathed in years. Not, Numair suspected, since its last inhabitant had died. They walked in in silence to find the indelible personality of a man etched into the bones of the cluttered space, more than Numair had ever seen in the faded remains of the decadent east wing. 

“So this is your father, then,” said Numair thoughtfully, looking around the room. The man he’d seen so long ago in Carthak, this was the world he’d carved out of the ancient bowels of his city.

Savigny said nothing. He seemed overwhelmed.

The room was, for all intents and purposes, a study, but Numair could tell that long use had turned it into something much more than that. The dry air down here, having escaped the bulk of the flooding, had preserved the materials stored in the drawers and shelves. Books, scrolls, much like Numair’s own studies. Trinkets of interest. Numair found a glass bauble painted with clumsy strokes and earned a small, sad laugh from Savigny as he admitted that he and Don had made it many midwinters ago. Numair placed it back onto the desk where it sat within easy reach of the desk’s inhabitant, his heart sore.

He kept exploring. Leaving Savigny to read through the paperwork, he crept onwards and found that there were more rooms beyond this, the doors sealed with powerful magic that lingered. Numair wondered if they’d lead back up to the estate, or if they were passageways that would take him to the Bog, to the rest of the Jewel … to the palace.

He turned back, returning to Savigny who was standing holding a book open in one hand. Numair went to the desk and searched the drawers with care for all the time that had passed and the likelihood of traps.

He found a hastily bound book of notes taken by an errant hand, only glancing up once to Savigny before flipping it open and skimming the page his eyes fell upon.

_ Animals exposed to her blood, laden as it is with her strange Wild magic, are altered into a more human-like state, their intelligence increasing, their humanity. It leads some to ponder the alteration that may be made to a human with the same exposure, especially if they already have proclivities towards feral magics.  _

Cold trickled into the back of Numair’s throat. He turned to the first page.

_ A report upon the Assessment of the Feral magechild, Veralidaine Sarrasri, 14y.o, as requested by Her Majesty’s Crown in return for the magechild’s sanctuary until a use is found for her within the court of her Queen. Completed by Lord Dieudonné de Hartholm. _

He flipped to the final page, written in a hurry. A single furious line, the quill drawn so fiercely across the parchment that the page had torn as it went.

_ I will not harm her; even dogs protect their young. How dare they ask this of me. _

“Savigny,” croaked Numair, his voice gone to shock.

But Savigny was grinning, his eyes overbright and his excitement almost hysterical. “This is  _ it _ !” he gasped, closing the book he was reading with a giddy snap as he gestured to the rooms. “Numair! We’ve found it! All his work, all the work of every spymaster before him – it’s all here! Everything I need to turn us from the path the meddling of Don’s mind has put us on. Father was a scholar, an academic. There may be scrolls on the fearwood here, or, ah! Something to heal Don! I’m certain of it!”

He laughed, ruffling his hair with the sheer relief of this discovery.

Numair quietly closed the book, holding it to his side against the line of his borrowed coat. He needn’t have bothered. Savigny was in no state to pay attention to his unease right now.

The book was small. Numair tucked it into his pocket.

They’d speak of it later, when hearts had calmed.

“I don’t need to return to him as his Gift,” Savigny finished, coming to Numair and kissing him with a ferocity that took Numair’s breath away. “I  _ can  _ remain in the shadows. I can remain myself.”

Numair returned his kisses until something gripped him suddenly, a reckless, unfathomable urge that he obeyed without thought. He surged against Savigny as the pressure of the last twenty-four hours, and all the months before it, uncorked spectacularly within him and he spiralled into the same relief that was flooring his partner. Savigny rose against it, somehow getting turned in the fuss so it was his back that struck the desk. Fingers scratched at the cords of the coat; a knee pressed Numair’s thighs apart; a mouth called him into madness; the book slapped against the side of his hip within the depths of his pocket.

Overawed and undone, Numair shook himself into brief sanity and pulled back, managing a husky, “We should return or they’ll think we’re lost,” that he knew was hopeless as soon as he saw Savigny’s expression. He’d never seen it so focused.

“You held me when I told you I abandoned you to Raven,” said Savigny.

Numair blinked. He wasn’t proud to admit that quite a bit of his thinking power had been rerouted by Savigny’s passion, and it took him longer than he’d have liked to wrest it back to head height. “Of course,” he said. “I don’t know the mechanisms of her hold over you, so how can I shun you for it? I’m fine. If it hadn’t happened, we’d be much poorer – we wouldn’t know that there’s something to be done.”

His voice soft, Savigny said, “I’ve never met anyone willing to love me in the shadows of the work I do, no matter the shape of it. I mean, when I say love, of course, I don’t –”

Numair said, “I would love you no matter the shape of you.”

Words, like a summer storm, could change them forever.

Shaken, Savigny stammered out his response: “Bring the dark back, Numair. Pull it into here.”

The dark lingered outside, held back by the glittering stones in the centuries of skulls that built this place. Numair knew he could call it within. He could dispel it too. It would obey him, once it recognised his skill. But to do something so alarming as to  _ welcome  _ the darkness and the danger it posed to his self, his sanity …

“Why?” he asked.

Savigny said, “I would have you as I am. For that, I need the dark. Please.”

Numair welcomed it.

Numair breathed sharply, pressed hard to the body against his even as his heart galloped from exhaustion. The absolute darkness was around them, though this time Numair held it tight in his Gift’s grip. One of his hands braced them upon the wood of the desk. Savigny was gasping against his shoulder in shallow, breathy lunges. He had one arm draped over Numair’s shoulder, curled around his neck, pulling him in. He was, otherwise, silent. They’d been silent this whole time except for the murmur of Savigny guiding Numair in where to touch and just how to move.

A slow shift upwards and Numair felt Savigny arch in response, air expelled, his breathing hoarse. One of his legs tightened around Numair’s, pulling him closer.

“Do you want –” Numair began, far too pent up from anxious, overexcited stimulation to be quiet or calm.

“Don’t,” panted Savigny, his voice odd. Numair tried to attend to why, but the darkness had already swallowed the sound of it: “Just … not there, here.”

He reached down, taking Numair’s hand from him and moving it to his chest where he paused, uncertain. Numair felt like he was drowning in shadow, wringing love from midnight itself. He couldn’t even see Savigny’s face, inches as it was from his own; he had no idea, without visual cues, without the tone of the other man’s voice, what his expression was.

He took a gamble and set his hand against Savigny’s face, not his body, as he moved into him. The desk against Numair’s stabilising hand; the dark against his back. And he tensed; the cheek that his fingers were resting ever so kindly against, the face that turned now to accept his caress … Numair fumbled closer and kissed the mouth he found, tasting heat, dark, damp, salt. Fear gripped him tight, on top of the relief, on top of the anxiety, on top of the joy. There wasn’t enough of him to contain all this feeling. Whatever was happening here, whatever Savigny was begging of him to give, he didn’t feel like he was succeeding; he felt, once more, dangerously upon the precipice, about to either slip over and plunge into devastation or, failing that, he felt like he was going to lose his grip on Savigny and let him fall in Numair’s stead.

From the dark, a whisper, from Savigny’s damp, unhappy mouth, though he seemed thankful at the moment for the chance to gasp it.

“I love you as best as I know how,” was his whisper. Numair swept a thumb across the ridge of Savigny’s cheekbone, finding that above that his eyes were shut and his lashes wet. “It won’t be enough, though. You know it won’t.”

Numair hung on tighter. Acutely aware that he was the only being between Savigny and the dark; if he wished it, they would have light now, cast down upon them in this frantic, human moment. If they wished it, he could summon the ability to see, to examine with his eyes exactly what was haunting his lover. But Savigny had asked for the dark; he hadn’t wanted to be seen like this. He just wanted to be loved, as he was, in the dark, out of sight.

Very well, thought Numair. If he wanted the dark, Numair would give it to him. 

But he wouldn’t stand aside and let it consume him.


	28. Into the Raven’s Nest

Numair missed Savigny. He’d left on another journey just the week before without knowing when he’d return, and Numair was keenly feeling his absence. Daine said he was pouting. Numair said he was doing nothing of the sort.

Somehow, his moping had given Daine all the ammunition she needed to convince him  _ this  _ was a good idea, and he was therefore riding down to the Bog with her and accompanied by a feeling that Sav was going to be mad at him for allowing this.

“Sav isn’t my keeper,” said Daine with dangerous calm when he voiced this. “I do as I please and he can keep his pretty nose out of my business.”

Numair was struck by another wave of sadness. “He  _ does  _ have a pretty nose, doesn’t he?” he reminisced, folding himself woefully over his horse’s mane and sighing into it. 

Daine gave him a disgusted look.

“Some people are terrible in love,” she muttered to her horse, who snorted.

With his usual uneasy fondness of horses, which battled with his surety that they were capricious, wicked creatures with a nasty mind for gossip and mean teeth, Numair eyed Daine’s horse. It was a soft bay mare with a sweet face and a quiet way about her, but that didn’t mean he trusted her. 

Daine had found Numair a mount too, a grey creature that was so placid that no matter how outrageously Numair rode him, he simply kept plodding on. Savigny had laughed himself silly when he’d seen him, delighted that Daine had chosen a horse for Numair in the same fashion as a father picking out their child’s first pony.

Numair had once told Daine his feelings on horses, to which she’d told him that he clearly didn’t have an issue with capricious wickedness, seeing as he was Savigny’s lover.

Numair had had no response to that.

They rode onwards in silence.

Numair, of course, broke it first. He was antsy, wondering where Savigny was, how Constant was doing in the palace, what George – who he still hadn’t contacted to finish their suspended conversation – wanted of him. He was nervous of Daine’s mount, whom Daine had informed him was named Sugar, and who had her head dangerously close to his leg. He was weary of his horse, the oddly named Ginger considering he was grey, who seemed to be dozing as he strolled along. It had all culminated in him deciding to chatter, no matter Daine’s feelings on him doing so. 

“Do we have a plan for this lovely outing?” he asked. “Or shall we wander to and fro from one side of the Bog to the other, seeking those who desire our attention? Perhaps we can attach painted boards to our horses advertising our services, in case the guards need assistance realising we’re up to treacherous business –”

“You didn’t need to come,” Daine pointed out.

“If I thought Savigny would be mad at me for going with you to the Bog, that’s nothing compared to how I sense he’ll feel if I let you go alone.” Numair slouched morbidly into the saddle. “Perhaps we’ll be arrested, or thrown into a river, or –”

“Numair,” said Daine, drawing his attention to their surroundings. They were at the gate between the inner city and the outer sprawl of the Bog. Numair fell quiet as they turned towards the gatehouse, where they could stable their horses if they didn’t desire to take them further out, which they didn’t. For a fee, of course.

Daine didn’t speak again until they were walking together through the Bog, old cloaks she’d presented for this purpose wrapped around their shoulders. Daine and Numair had wardrobes of their own, both that they’d bought themselves with their coin and some that Savigny had gifted them; neither wore items from those wardrobes now. It wasn’t a good idea to draw attention with fine clothes this far from the Jewel. Numair hadn’t asked why she’d had beaten down clothes in his size tucked away ready for him. He suspected he wouldn’t like it if she told him he was terribly predictable. 

There was a tight feeling in the people they passed. Numair looked at everything. The increase in abandoned homes with the slashed X’s upon the doors, many of which had been partially burned or destroyed. The people here moved in groups, suspicion etched on every face. There was none of the ease that he’d seen the last time he’d come here on a quest to reclaim Savigny’s horse. The animals he saw too, a pack of roving dogs, several cats skittering in the shadows, and the very occasional horse, they were all skinny, mangy creatures with staring ribs and anxious eyes.

“See how few animals there are now?” Daine said to Numair as they walked, keeping close to his arm. “Sav wasn’t wrong, that the people will turn to their animals for food if they need, but when the horses start going that’s when you know things are bad. It’s the meat animals first, the pigs and ducks and chickens. That’s what they survived on last winter.”

Numair looked around. They were walking down what he recognised as the main thoroughfare, with marketplaces to either side. Daine was right. There were no chickens underfoot or pigs being driven for sale. He couldn’t hear the sounds of ducks or geese either, only the dogs snarling and horses neighing. The sounds that were missing were louder than the sounds he could hear, especially if he thought back to the earlier ride through the inner city.

“A winter hungry enough to eat the stock creatures means no babies for sale next season,” Daine continued, huddling further into her cloak despite the heat. “Meat prices go up. And hungry eyes turn elsewhere to feed families, to rats and pigeons and cats and dogs. Horses … they’re last. It’s a desperate city that eats their horses. They only do that if they know they’ll die if they don’t, since they’re eating their livelihood and they know it.”

“How do you know this?” Numair asked, grotesquely fascinated. 

“I spent last winter in the Bog,” said Daine, Numair flinching at the reminder. “I heard talk. Worries about slavers from Maren coming into the city to take advantage of families needing less mouths to feed and night folk looking for girls they might rope into slavery right here at home just for a warm bed. Couple of them tried to get me on my back by warning me it was a horse winter coming if this year’s harvest fails.”

She looked down at the road they walked on, which was packed dirt turned to mud.

“I never did,” she said defiantly. “I was lucky. There was always a meal for me if I was quick enough. Someone kind always found me. Sometimes I thought it was a sign that people were better than they seemed, though I know sometimes I wondered if it was some kind of divine protection. Seemed like it wasn’t as hard to live as it should have been, mad as I was. Now, I don’t know. Maybe it was my da.”

Numair thought of the badger.

“I don’t think your da knew where you were,” he said carefully. “The badger didn’t seem to think so. Your survival is yours, Daine. You did that.”

“I don’t know,” she said. Shoulders folded and expression dull. “I don’t know what’s me anymore.” Abruptly, her expression altered, became narrowed, sharp. “Don’t you think it’s strange that we have gods for everything under the sun, but no gods to peer down and tell us not to do that?”

Numair looked where she pointed, his stomach lurching as he saw a horse latched to a cart. The horse was flayed bloody with a horsewhip and driven to a foam. It was so far gone it was being held up only by the harness that caged it, its white-ringed eyes glazed.

Daine jerked towards it.

Numair grabbed her arm.

“There are people everywhere,” he warned her softly. “What do you hope to achieve? Is your freedom worth a horse’s life?”

“I don’t know,” she hissed, pulling free. “Maybe we should ask the horse what he thinks, should we?”

Numair was shocked into silence, allowing Daine her chance to escape. It was an uncomfortable shift of perspective, Daine so easily making him realise that believing humans were more important than animals was a perspective it was unlikely the animals shared.

She was right too, he knew, looking at the horse as Daine whispered to it. He would never stand aside and let a human be treated like this. A horse was no different.

Numair walked up to them. 

From where Daine had her face pressed to the horse, who wheezed brokenly, she said to Numair, “You said there was a chance I could help the animals to think more human, to think ahead more.”

Numair had said this, taken from his study of Dieudonné’s notes on her. He hadn’t yet told her of those. He didn’t know if she remembered.

“Yes,” he said, looking at the horse’s open wounds. In a day, it would be flyblown. He didn’t think Daine could do anything to save it.

“That’s why I came here,” said Daine. “I want to warn them to flee if the harvest fails. I don’t want people to starve, but the animals should have a chance to get away too. Otherwise, they’ll trust right until their people turn the sword on them, tails wagging as they’re cut down. Numair can’t you  _ see _ . If I let that happen, I’m … I don’t know what I am, but I’m not me.”

She looked, once more, at the horse. There was a beat of silence. Numair’s heart hurt.

“He says his name is Jacoby,” said Daine, stroking the blaze of white below the horse’s forelock. 

Numair decided. 

“Find out who owns him,” he said, determined. Daine glanced at him, the hope in her eyes triggering a violent memory of Constant at the austringer’s stall. Moments later, Numair thought, Mithros damn anyone who stood by when someone hurt you like this horse has been hurt. “We’ll buy him and get him somewhere people won’t see so you can heal him as much as you can.”

She looked as though she might cry.

Numair thought he might too.

Jacoby wasn’t going to make it back to the inner city. There were eyes on them from all sides as Numair realised this, leading Daine and the staggering horse down a side alley as the horse fought to fall to his knees. Daine tried to keep him upright. They both knew once he was down, that was it for him. 

Numair, for his part, did his damndest to keep the flies from the horse’s ruined flank. He was tight with anger for this horse, who hadn’t deserved the hands who had laid claim to him. 

“Help me,” whispered Daine, wheeling on Numair. “He needs healing now!”

Numair looked around. There were buildings with grimy shutters barely clasped and other roads that snaked out from this alley like cracks in breaking ice. Passers-by were peeking in and, he knew, likely thoroughfare over the rooftops as well. It was the absolute opposite of private, in this place where so many humans were slammed together in shared misery. 

He also knew there was no point telling her this. Even as he glanced back at her, he saw the sparks of copper fire that leapt from her hands to the horse, summoned by his aching need.

Jacoby stumbled, and he went down onto his poor, battered knees.

“Numair!”

Numair made his choice.

“Don’t let him cast himself,” he warned, going to the far side of the horse and bracing him upright as he went to roll to his side. “Daine, do you remember the anatomy of a horse? I can’t give you the information via my mind as I did Savigny, not here. That will leave us both too vulnerable. But I also don’t know what’s killing him fastest.”

Most likely, Numair knew, it was just that the great old heart of the poor creature was run down from ill-use. Hearts could be like that. They only took so much breaking before they slowed down for good. If it was that, there wouldn’t be anything to save. Even wild mages couldn’t fix a broken soul.

Daine stared at the horse. “I don’t think I do,” she said, stricken. “Not well enough to avoid hurting him. You were so cautious with Constant and the falcon, and the mice …”

“I was, and for good reason,” said Numair gently. “But it might not matter so much here. He’s not going to last without you, where the falcon may have healed naturally without Constant’s help. Can your magic feel where he’s faltering? If he pulls, call out to me.”

Daine nodded, resting her hands on the horse and closing her eyes. While she did so, Numair warded them in a close, tight circle, his eyes locked on her. It was too much magic. If there were Sniffers nearby …

He’d masked his magic from cleverer noses than them, for sure, and wild magic was hard to detect, but this was sloppy, rushed work. Savigny would have him by the ear for this.

“Careful,” he warned, seeing a surge of copper flood her hands, uncontrolled, chaotic. She was fighting it, he could tell, but it was beginning to tangle up around her panic. “Daine.”

She looked at him; for a heartbeat, her eyes were a soft, horse brown.

“Careful,” he said again, fear ticking up. “Perhaps I should put a boundary between your mind and –”

“There isn’t time,” she said. “His lung is bleeding inside. I can heal it. I think I can … I  _ can _ . But I have to do it now, or he’ll drown in it.”

Trusting her was hard. She made it easy by being so spectacular, but it also terrified him because he knew she wasn’t saying ‘nothing will go wrong’. They both knew it could. What she was saying is ‘you have to let me fight on my own, no matter the cost’. 

Like Savigny, this made him worry.

Unlike Savigny, he could set that worry aside.

He set his knee against the horse, keeping him upright, and his hand he used to stroke the horse’s lathered neck. And he nodded.

She dived again.

He watched the copper threads of her magic flow smoothly between her and the horse, thin threads breaking loose as they were summoned by the pain from his lashed skin. The majority of it stayed where she put it, congregating around where the lungs flailed within the barrel chest. Daine was so bright with her magic by now Numair could barely look straight at her without his eyes watering, obscuring her features. He hoped they weren’t horsey, but he was too nervous of missing her losing control to turn his mage vision off to check. 

He wished, dearly, that he knew how to weave the illusions that Nonny was so skilled at, to hide them from onlookers’ eyes. Though few others could see magic like he could unassisted, there was no hiding that  _ something  _ was happening here. For the first time, he realised why the illusion work he was seeing more and more of around Cría might be so accomplished here where it wasn’t in other places; if mages wished to practice here, first they had to learn to hide.

Daine’s eyes opened. Even through the copper, he saw that they were dark, and that she was looking past his shoulder with her expression uneasy. He saw her mouth his name.

He turned and swallowed when he saw the men watching them from the mouth of the alley. They couldn’t see magic. Their vision wasn’t obscured as Numair’s was. 

He flicked his mage vision off, blinked to clear his eyes, and glanced at Daine – groaning when he saw the rough brown fur on her bare arms and the whiskers around her mouth. She was still locked into the healing, refusing to let go until it was done, and he could tell by her frantic glancing from him to the men that she didn’t believe they were friendly. 

“Sorry,” Numair murmured to Jacoby, who was quietly focused on what Daine was doing inside him. Then he stood, wincing when the horse made a pained sound as he fell fully onto its side, a position no horse felt comfortable in when they didn’t feel like they could get back up again. But there was nothing to be done.

Numair turned to the men. 

Too late, he saw the glowing blue thumbprints upon their faces. They were marked as non-mages, and they were marked in the lowest city where it was still not required. That meant they’d chosen to display themselves as ‘clean’. He was unarmed. Defensive magic with his Gift would destroy the buildings around them, or harm innocents either passing by or in those buildings. It may even harm Daine. He was, once again, stifled by the power of his Gift.

Savigny would have his neck for this if there was enough left of it when they were done.

“I think it could be made worthwhile for all of us to walk away from here,” he said with lazy disinterest, hoping his best noble’s drawl would dissuade them from the mischief he could see in the way they were looking at Daine. 

They didn’t speak; they simply drew their swords.

“Bother,” muttered Numair. He stepped carefully outside of the warding circle, strengthening it as he went. It wouldn’t fail unless he did. Raising his voice, he warned them, “I’m not a man to be trifled with. Be on your way in peace and I’ll give you coin to do so.”

The men murmured. Numair heard one of them whisper  _ witch _ and he knew how this confrontation was going to end. He didn’t wait for it to escalate.

“Daine, get him walking,” he urged. Then he raised his arm and slowed the world around them. The men’s eyes widened as they were suddenly trying to move in air that felt viscous. They couldn’t shout, or speak, or cry out. They could only flail in slow-motion, horror shaping their expressions into ghastly contortions of rage. Daine, within the confines of the warding circle, was untouched. Numair fought to keep it contained within the alley, to just the men who threatened them, though his Gift battled him in this. It wanted to sprawl out as far as it could, and he was greatly distracted by this warring.

He didn’t see who threw the rock, obscured as they must have been by the rooftops above. 

He felt it though.

As pain erupted from the site on his skull where the projectile connected, Numair staggered. At that moment he had a choice to make, to either let his Gift surge along with the pain of the blow and leak into the surrounding streets or to release it entirely. As one option endangered innocents, it meant only the other was tenable. 

He found himself on his knees with his hands pressed to his bloodied head, dizzy with shock. He looked up as the men descended, swords aloft. It was a mystery what he would have done next, pressured as he was to react fast and with severe finality. He didn’t get a chance. She was so much faster than he’d ever known.

A wolf flung itself from behind him, clearing him easy as it went with ferocious grace for the throat of the closest man. Still dazed and with half his vision obscured by the blood that was shedding quite freely from his fool skull, Numair tried to follow it with his eyes and found himself throwing up as this led his gaze to glance towards the blaze of light that was the opening of the alley. How easily a man could be bested by a simple rock; he was, briefly, embarrassed.

Then he realised who the wolf was, and he watched her kill a man without hesitation, and he heard her shriek with rage, and he realised just how severely he’d messed up.

Ignoring the gruesome sense that his brain was tilt-drunk, Numair staggered upright, reeling in place, and yelled, “Daine!” before she could go for the next man, who posed a threat to her in the way he was holding his sword. As infuriated as she was, she’d fling herself right onto the blade.

Daine froze, though her fangs were bared and her back was a great ridge of raised fur, and she snarled like a robber’s knife. 

“They’ll be sorry if you go,” he reminded her, meaning her brothers, and adding, “and so will I,” on the end in case she, somehow, didn’t know already. “Don’t leave us.”

Daine turned her head and watched him through impartial wolf eyes.

He held his hand out to her.

And, for that moment, it was just them.

With a great sigh, Jacoby died.

Even though he was there, it was hard for Numair to describe exactly what happened next. Daine screamed, he knew that. It was a sound that was a perfect cross between a wolf and a human. It was terrible. He also knew that the men died, though only two of them to her wolf teeth; the other three, next he looked up, stared back at him with throats cut by a savage knife. And Daine was lunging towards him with her fearsome mouth gaping wide, the stink of wolf triggering some deep-set primal fear within him as he fell back, blood in his eyes – until a figure swooped overhead, catching her fearlessly with one hand. Daine sagged, going still in her captor’s grasp.

Behind the men, the patchwork mage appeared from the shadows, their knife bloodied, their smile chaotic. 

Raven turned to look at Numair, even as she lowered the limp Daine with tender care to the torn-up ground.

“Fool,” said the rebel without venom in the eyes that watched him from behind the beaked mask. “The Sniffers will be converging. Nonsense, gather the idiot mage. We won’t be here when they arrive.”

Numair didn’t argue. He went where Daine did and, right now, that was wherever Raven was choosing to take them. 

When he came to from his dazzled, half-conscious existence, he found that he was in a small sitting room, laid out on a soft but worn couch. He sat up, wincing as he almost threw up again from the pain in his throbbing head, and looked around. It was an ill-furnished room, barebones and scarred. The couch he was upon had bloodstains upon it, scrubbed into the ragged fabric. The room smelled strongly of women’s perfume. 

“Don’t get up,” warned a husky voice that Numair ignored. The voice added, “I told you so,” in a disapproving voice as Numair found that his legs were too silly to hold him, crumpling back down with a groan. 

“Daine,” Numair managed through his dizziness, his mouth filling with saliva.

A basin was thrust under his chin. He spat in it, though it was mostly bile, and looked up to glare at his captor. And he swallowed, shocked.

Raven, unmasked, was not as he’d expected. She was dizzyingly attractive but in a fierce, handsome way, the whole of her features more enthralling than any singular one on its own. Her skin was as darkly gorgeous as Savigny’s, though cooler where he was warm, and she wore no sparklies around her throat or ears as he did. Her eyes were an arresting hazel, though they shifted to Numair’s shell-shocked mind. He realised he was staring moments before he managed to stop. It wasn’t that she was beautiful that had startled him so; it was her painted face. Around her eyes as a captivating crowning glory, her skin was painted to resemble feathers of black and green-black, shot through with sparks of light. There was magic in the paintwork, he was conscious enough to realise, and another even deeper part of him recognised that at least part of that magic was responsible for the desire that overwhelmed him to fall to his knees and pledge his undying loyalty to her. He wanted to see those lips that he couldn’t describe but knew were stunning smile, he wanted to hear her shape his name, he wanted to feel her hands on his body –

_ Savigny _ , whispered an even deeper part of his mind.

He hesitated, conflicted.

_ Daine _ , added his brain.

“Daine,” he said, pushing himself away from Raven. Something like disgust flickered across her features, and the compulsion drifted away. “Where is my companion, the woman? How did you get us here? I wasn’t hit hard enough to lose my mind that severely.”

“You were struck enough,” said Raven, setting the basin aside and picking up a wet cloth, which she leaned forward to daub at Numair’s temple with. His brain almost short-circuited, but he slammed up walls within his mind and stayed firmly behind them. He refused to be tempted. “It’s not the patient’s place to declare how hard they were hit. Though I must say, I’ve never had a patient quite as lovely to wait upon as you.”

Numair stared coldly back at her wink.

“Take me to Daine,” he said, his voice ice. 

All traces of flirt vanished from her expression as she examined him right back. It occurred to him that this was the woman who terrified Sav so. A shard of anger contorted into his heart as he wondered if she’d trapped his lover in her seductive glamours to have such a hold over him. What had Elspeth said, all that time ago? That Sav had been poured over the wall before, smelling of back-alley beds? Numair didn’t hate people very easily, but he probably could have hated Raven right then, his mind following that to its logical conclusion. Seduction under compulsion was rape and nothing prettier.

He added, “If you turn that compulsion back on, I’ll bind your Gift within you and leave you as mundane as any other creature.”

To his surprise, Raven inclined her head and withdrew, giving him space.

“I apologise,” she said. Numair blinked owlishly at her. “I do. It was a grievous misstep, I don’t know why I thought it would be clever. I … forgot myself. Be assured, Master Numair, that it is a skill I rarely utilise. I can see the disgust in your eyes and it wounds me, to have you think so.”

“I would have you before a truth-teller,” he warned her, “to swear you’d never used it to lure any gart nor gissy to your bed.”

“May Weiryn’s hounds take me if I lie,” she responded. “I have never compelled another to my bed.”

“Including Savigny de Hartholm?” he asked, another surge of anger snapping ice up his spine as she choked out a shocked laugh. “Don’t mock me.”

She stepped back, for a brief second uneasy by whatever she saw in him right then.

When she spoke again, the unease was gone. Masked as easily as her features, as he realised now that they were illusions too. Clarity, sharpened by rage, pointed out the embroidery on her heavy vest and the patterns painted into the feathers about her false eyes. Just like the assassin, Nonny. Numair wondered, did no one in Galla wear a face of their own?

“How insulting, to think you’d accuse me of taking that milk pampered imp to my bed,” she sneered, her voice turned to dripping disdain that infuriated him easier than anything else she could have done. Savigny, noble blood or no, was worth thousands of her;  _ he  _ would never hide behind a mask to stand for what he believed in. “Is this how you greet all women in Tortall? To accuse them of whorishness? Or is it just that you think he’s so sweet that every girl in Galla is aching to flip their skirts for him? He  _ must  _ be darling in bed, for you to be so. I cannot think what else appeals about him.”

Numair seethed.

“A dandy brat,” Raven mocked, circling. “Womb wet little kitten. You’re a fool, to cosset him. He’ll have his throat slit along with the rest of them, thrown over the palace walls to fertilise the lawn with noble blood, his stinking corpse rotting just like any other murdered beast –”

“That’s enough.”

Numair shot upright, whirling with his Gift blazing, alive, enraged. He could have, at that moment, happily done something stupid, but he was not an assassin, he was not a battlemage. Angry enough to rend the world or not, he must have control.

He stared at the beaked mask of Raven, leaning against the walls in the shadows where she’d been, he realised now, this whole time. And then he swung around to stare at the woman who’d mocked him, who’d threatened Savigny.

The false Raven cackled, face peeling back like tortured paint until it was the patchwork mage, the assassin Nonsense, who stood there in her place. 

Numair swallowed. He felt ill. How many faces did they wear? It was terrifying, to realise how easily they could wear another. 

Could they, if they wished, wear his?

“I tire of these games,” said Numair in a voice he barely recognised, so furious it was. “Take me to Daine now or I’ll rip this hovel down around your ears and damn you all with it.”

“Nonsense, tell Remy to bring Daine to us immediately,” said the true Raven from where she stood, making no move to approach Numair. “Then leave.”

Nonsense offered a low bow to Raven and a mocking one to Numair, accompanied with a repulsed expression, before they scampered out of the room. It left Numair and Raven in desolate silence.

“I did not ask Nonsense to do that,” said Raven finally, though, Numair noticed, she didn’t apologise for her assassin’s behaviour. “I don’t appreciate the insolence they showed.”

“You didn’t stop them,” said Numair, turning on her. There was nothing to be gathered from her appearance. She was in the same heavy vest and skirt Nonsense had mimicked, which covered her body completely; her face was masked with the raven’s beak, and her hands were heavily gloved. Though, Numair noticed, in the true version of the woman, he could see that the clothes she wore were heavy because they were armoured at the throat and wrists – and likely the waist and stomach too, judging from the rigidity of her corset – which was a detail the assassin had missed. 

“I wasn’t here,” said Raven without emotion. “I entered as you two began to circle each other like scolded hounds. Your little trick today was foolish. What did you and the girl hope to achieve, risking everything for a horse? You could have both been killed, had I not had eyes upon you.”

“Daine would argue that the saving of one creature’s life is worth the risk of another,” replied Numair. “Why are we more precious than a horse? They have gods too, do they not?”

Dispassionate eyes watched from over the raven’s beak.

Numair decided to be blunt.

“Whether you encouraged your assassin’s running tongue or not,” he said, pacing closer with his fury driving him, “I warn you now and only now that, though I am a man slow to anger, if you or your people threaten mine, if you come within a yard of Savigny de Hartholm or his brother, I will see you wiped from this land with every inch of rage I am capable of. I will  _ flatten  _ your little hideaway, your nasty assassin, and your outrageous rebellion. Freedom isn’t won on the blood of innocent people. If you insist upon making it so, I will make an example of you.”

“You would risk your vow to avenge a Hartholm?” asked Raven, the surprise in her voice audible even through the mask. “Your Tortallan is showing. I hear they’re lousy with honourable nobles down there. The Hartholms are rotten all the way through, Salmalín. They’re spies and consorts with royalty. Savigny chirps a pretty song, but his feathers are gilded. When the gates fall, he’ll stand with his king and fight for things to stay as they are, with his boot on our throats, forever. If the price of Galla’s freedom is Donatien’s blood, Savigny will not pay it. He isn’t capable.”

Numair was shaken more by this unfeeling summation of Savigny’s loyalties, even more so than Nonny’s sadism. 

“My vow?” he asked. It was easier than lashing out against the rest of that statement. “What vow?”

Raven looked away, a movement which altered the shadows of the mask to throw her eyes into utter darkness. It was uncomfortable to look upon her like so.

“Daine will be here soon,” was Raven’s answer. “I have a proposition, Numair. See to your student. Ensure yourself of her sanity and her wellbeing, both of which are intact. Savigny de Hartholm knows of us and has hired many of us in the past to assist Daine when she has been lost in our territories. We know how to pull her away from the black if she is not too long lost. Once you are certain she is well, return to this room, to me. I have a story for you. I will tell you as we travel.”

“Daine comes with us,” Numair said without even thinking about it. He knew he’d go; he couldn’t leave now, not when he was this close to the beating heart of Galla’s rebellion. He also wouldn’t leave Daine alone. 

“Are you certain?” asked Raven, still looking away. “I am taking you to view the reality of Savigny’s duplicity, the blood that stains her brothers’ hands. Will you test her loyalties so, damage her love and affection for the boys who ran alongside her as children?”

Numair hesitated.

“She’s an adult,” he said finally. “It’s not my place to protect her from the world. The choice is hers and hers alone.”

They travelled below the city, following the cowled figure of Raven as she led them unerringly forward. Daine hung close to Numair, but she was a miserable kind of silent, something dark in her eyes when he looked at her in the bland light from the lantern Raven held.

“We’ll talk when we’re home, me and you,” Numair promised her with a gentle touch of his hand to her elbow. “Nothing that happened today has changed my opinion of you.”

“I thought they’d killed you,” was all she said. “There was so much blood.”

“Head wounds bleed freely,” he said with a wince, touching the bandage on his temple. “It wasn’t much of a hit.”

Daine didn’t answer.

“These tunnels, do they cover the entire city?” Numair called ahead to Raven, who slowed from where she’d sped up as though to escape Daine and Numair’s whispered conversation. Truly, Numair was wondering if the tunnels were linked to the catacombs that held Savigny’s new hideaway. If so, it wasn’t as private as they’d hoped.

“No,” said Raven. “The city builders are paid by those from the Jewel, and those from the Jewel have always feared them they lord over. The sewers and service tunnels for the Jewel are separate from those of the inner city, which again only link to the Bog where we have linked them. There is no linking the Jewel to the rest. They had clever mages set vicious traps for those that tried, and there is always the risk of tunnelling into the catacombs.”

Daine twitched, glancing briefly at Numair.

“Catacombs?” she asked with perfect innocence.

“Cities of the dead, below the Jewel,” said Raven without inflection. “They were thought to have collapsed decades ago. I’m unconvinced. Either way, one would be foolish to play in them. Only the desperate disturb the dead.”

Numair smiled on the inside.

“You promised us a story,” he reminded her, feeling Daine shadowing his footsteps closely, as though she was terrified of losing him down here. He slowed to let her walk beside him, forcing Raven to slow too. “Well, now seems the time, as you walk us through this gloomy rabbit warren.”

Raven turned to look at them both, grotesque in the shadows. 

“Very well,” she said, turning back. They followed her. “Here is the story of why Savigny de Hartholm is going to die.”


	29. Behind the Raven’s Mask

Numair didn’t know what he’d expected because it certainly wasn’t this. Perhaps Daine sensed his mounting horror as Raven spoke, worsening even beyond the grim proclamation the rebel had begun her tale with. It was only a matter of time, Numair knew, before Daine realised why he was so mortified.

He hadn’t even realised himself, at first.

“There were once two young boys who grew so close together they intertwined, each altering the other as the vine alters the tree it devours,” said Raven. Daine rolled her eyes, showing the first spark of life since they’d pulled her out of herself. “One grew up to rule; the other to serve.”

“We know this, crow,” snapped Daine, her temper sharpened. None of her usual shyness was showing. Raven had earned her meanest ire, threatening Savigny’s life. Numair loved Daine so much at that moment. “Me better than anyone. He’s  _ my _ brother.”

“The servile boy, now a man, wasn’t comfortable serving,” said Raven, her tone lower. Numair could see her gloved hand tightening around the lantern. “He sensed his considerable powers would one day be turned against those he loved. He reviled the concept of being turned into a weapon.”

The first trickle of unease dripped into Numair’s mind. 

“Don’t,” he said, his voice hoarse.

Daine shot him a startled look.

Raven, of course, ignored him.

“The ruler took his throne,” she said. Her boots were loud in the sullen silence of the tunnels, which now felt claustrophobic around Numair’s being. The dark outside the pool of light from the lantern was threatening; there wasn’t enough air; the pain from his head was growing and growing, the dizziness a constant annoyance. “The people kneeled to him because they’d die if they didn’t. He was charming, and cruel. He was  _ very  _ good at hiding his viciousness. It’s easy to be monstrous when you’re beautiful, I’ve found. People overlook just how venomous your fangs are. How long did the servile boy obey his lover’s whims, Salmalín? How long did he remain charmed by that pretty, lying tongue?”

Numair rubbed his eyes, which hurt too.

“Don isn’t cruel,” said Daine, who was still struggling to follow where Raven and Numair had already gone, though Numair could tell from the way she was looking at him that she wasn’t far from figuring it out.

“Oh, but the lover, he knew about his servant’s rebellious heart,” said Raven, finally stopping as she turned to look at Numair. “He knew all along, of course. It wasn’t like the servant was quiet about it. He’d vowed from the start that he’d never be a weapon, no matter how terrible his power, how effective a weapon he could be. And he  _ did  _ have the potential to be terrible. It would all have been so easy. Just let him tell you what to do and you could have his love forever, for the low, low cost of the lives of those who hardly matter.”

“Everyone matters,” said Numair. “I told him I’d never be a battlemage, and I stood by that. So you know who I was. That has nothing to do with Savigny.”

By his side, Daine had gone very, very still.

“Doesn’t it?” asked Raven. “Let’s try another. It’s not quite as advanced as my first tale. It begins with two boys, one born to rule and the other to serve, who grow up intertwined …”

She trailed off, masked head tilted curiously as she waited to see, Numair assumed, if they’d fill in the gaps she’d left.

“I hurt no one,” snapped Numair, but she was ready for that.

“Except those you left behind,” was her callous answer. “You fled Carthak, Arram Draper, you who had the power to free them. It would have been so easy. You would have been celebrated. But you didn’t. Not when he had your friends executed in his slave pits, not when he crushed his people below his golden heel, and not even when he flaunted the sword made to execute you with. He still has it, you know. You remember the sword. You must. The  _ magekiller. _ He kissed your throat with it, so tenderly. Yet, he lives because you are the tree he crushed within his grasp, too weakened by his embrace to do what must be done. Just as Savigny is. When and if Savigny is called upon to do his duty to his people, he will do as you did. You refused to be the mad emperor’s battlemage. Savigny, however … not all trees are made equal.”

“I believe in him,” Numair coldly.

Raven replied, “You believed in Ozorne. It seems to be a grave character flaw of yours, that you persist in believing that your love is enough to divert fate.”

“ _ I  _ believe in Savigny,” said Daine, startling them both. Somehow, they’d forgotten she was there. They looked at her and she stared back without flinching, completely unimpressed by their posturing. Numair breathed again; some of the frantic tension of the moment was lost in the relief of realising, of remembering, that he wasn’t here alone. “ I don’t care what you think about it. Numair being here means he did the right thing even when it was hard. Seems to me if you think him and Savigny are the same, that means he’s going to as well.”

Raven examined Daine with such intensity that Numair felt uneasy, disliking her coming to the attention of someone he still didn’t understand. 

But then Raven surprised him too.

She ducked her head, as though hiding a smile under the mask, and said, “If only he were here to witness you saying that, little mage. Perhaps you’d give him the strength to be as strong as you believe he is.”

She turned to continue leading through the tunnels, which she didn’t seem to need to navigate through; she walked confidently, without stopping to orientate herself.

Numair went to follow, but Daine stopped him with a hand to his elbow.

“We’re not going another inch until you tell us why your little drama means Savigny’s in danger,” she said with riotous rage barely contained underneath the calm of her expression. “Because if you think you’re doing some grand thing for our people – _our_ people, they’re _mine_ too – in killing him, then we’ll be putting an end to that right here. He’s my brother and I won’t bury him. I won’t. The ground has got enough of the people I love. Any more is greedy.”

Something glittered in her eyes.

“If he was a good brother to you, you wouldn’t need to be so quick to threaten to kill,” Raven said, her voice so soft it was barely hers. 

“I killed before him,” Daine said bluntly. “I stopped because he found me, he and Don. Seems to me like I know him better than you do, better than Numair even for all that he’s the one you’re trying to goad into thinking with his heart instead of his head. Think what you want of me, that I’m small or mad or that my magic isn’t as big as Numair’s … I’m still going to be the one with my teeth in your throat because you were stupid and forget that Savigny is mine too.”

She stepped forward, that glitter in her eyes becoming something else, something frightening and soul deep. Numair sensed her magic stirring and was fascinated to see how her furious expression was subtly caught between a human’s grimace and a wolf’s hungry grin. A ripple of fur crossed her skin; her face writhed under the imaginary tethers that held her to her humanity. 

Raven backed up, one hand darting to her pocket. For what, Numair didn’t know, though he doubted it was a knife simply from the tight cut of the fabric. Indeed, as he raised his arm in warning, and Daine growled deep, he realised what Raven had grabbed wasn’t a weapon at all but a small vial that she uncorked and held close within her palm, hidden in the shadows. 

She made no move to attack or defend. That was it. 

Daine seemed thrown by that too, her wolfish anger fading as she gave Raven a quizzical look.

“You know, he’s never truly believed you think of him as a brother,” said Raven to Daine, who froze. “Savigny, I mean. The few times we’ve spoken of you, he’s been many things … but never certain of your affection. You should tell him.”

Daine was so rigid Numair could probably have used her to brace one of the crumbly walls surrounding them, if he was so inclined.

She whispered, “You bitch. You don’t get to say that to me.”

Raven shrugged, though Numair suspected her nonchalance was as much as an act as all of it, the cowl, the mask, the grim portents. Just like the assassin’s many faces, Raven was a creature of illusions. They were as their environment had forced them to be.

“I never meant to imply I  _ wanted  _ him dead,” Raven continued, turning her back on them as though uncaring of the danger they could pose to her. “Merely that it’s a fairly inevitable outcome of the people’s survival. We cannot survive Donatien’s reign as it is, no matter why that is. And if the king falls, so too do the structures that support him. Savigny is a structure.”

“He’s a  _ person _ ,” snapped Numair, shaking himself back to life. “Don’t dehumanise him because he’s between you and what you want. You’re so certain I could have killed Ozorne, but you can’t even face the concept of these people you want to see gone as people too. They’re not buildings that you can destroy and rebuild as though nothing of worth has been lost.”

Raven laughed. The mask made the sound grisly.

“Is this where you tell me of his brother and his dead parents?” she mocked. “About how you love him and find him precious and how you’d be sad without him?”

“No,” said Numair, silencing her. “It doesn’t matter if he’s a brother or a son or that he’s loved by so many. No one’s worth is defined by the people they’re surrounded by. People don’t matter  _ because _ . They just matter. He exists and he’s alive and there’s only one of him, which is why I won’t let you dismiss him. And I don’t think much of your grand rebellion if you don’t understand that. You’re going to end up another boot with your own Raven looking to overthrow you.”

In the quiet that followed, Daine added a satisfied, “ _ This  _ is why your story is stupid. Numair was never going to be some king’s sword, and Savigny won’t be either. They’re better than you.”

Raven looked at them for a good long while through her mask. Numair thought, for a moment, that she was considering taking it off, if only because her hand lifted as though to do so. She seemed to think better of it and smoothed the front of her vest down instead.

Finally, she spoke.

“We’re under the inner city now,” was what she said, glancing up. “In thirty minutes, His Majesty is having the assassin who threatened his life last spring publicly executed in Caveer Square as a warning to all those who would harm him.”

“The assassin was tried and found guilty of attempting to assassinate the king,” said Daine. “Is there a grander treason than that? Are we supposed to be horrified that he would dare? I don’t like it either, but if he doesn’t then he’s going to end up in assassins up to his ears. We’ll be sorrier if Don dies heirless. That’s a certainty even a simple thing like me understands.”

“His Majesty rarely orders executions,” said Raven stiffly. “I’m given to understand that he finds them ghastly and has little stomach for blood. When they are ordered, beyond his control as in the case of an assassin where the law grinds on without him, he refuses to view them. He will not be there. I intended to take Numair to see the spectacle that takes place below our good king’s blind eyes, those that puppet his limp strings. If he’s to assist me in my aims, I feel it’s important he understands as I do the forces working within this city.”

It was Numair’s turn to stiffen with outrage. “I don’t know what implied I was willing to help you. I certainly didn’t mean to give that impression.”

Raven met his gaze steadily, gesturing ahead. “Be that as it may, you still need to know. I’m sure you have those who’ll be interested.”

Daine folded her arms. “I don’t want to see,” she said. “I’ve seen enough dead today. Numair, let’s go.”

Hesitating, Numair looked from Daine to Raven. He did need to see. And he was nosy.

George would want to know.

“If we’re in the inner city, there’s no reason Daine can’t go home,” he said, “if she wants. I know my way back from Caveer when it’s done.” Daine didn’t look happy about this, so he added, for her sake, “I’m certain there’s no reason she should worry about leaving me alone.”

“None,” said Raven. “I’ll return you exactly as you are, idealistic and somewhat concussed.”

That unexpected glint of humour was more unsettling than anything else the rebel had said that day, Numair giving her an uncomfortable glance that he knew Daine was mirroring.

Ignoring it – he refused to laugh at her jokes – Numair turned his back on her and pulled Daine back to the very ring of the lantern light, surrounding them in a spell to muffle as he spoke to her alone. He tried, anyway. As soon as she was certain they were muffled and Raven couldn’t see their mouths to read their lips, she was at him.

“You said everyone matters,” she said, looking gaunt. “Every person, all of them. I killed two, today, Numair. Two men who matter. Maybe they had families like mine, or kids who’ll grow up without a da, and I did it because I  _ panicked _ . What does that make me if you hate Raven so much for being uncaring? What am –”

“Hush,” he said firmly. “I said we’d talk of it and we will. Do you think I haven’t killed before in a panic, or from fear or need? I have. I absolutely have. But this isn’t the place to knit ourselves up about it looking for answers. Will you collect the horses and go home? I promise I’ll be fine. She doesn’t want to harm me.”

“She wants to collect you,” muttered Daine, trying to glare at Raven through Numair’s chest. “Like a pretty knife. Still …”

She touched her nose, frowning again.

Numair was reminded.

“What was it in her pocket?” he asked. “I saw a vial or a capsule. Poison? Perhaps the drug she used to paralyse me in the palace, or you in the alley?”

Daine hesitated before saying, “Poison, I think. Or, not a poison, so much … yeah, you’re probably right. It’s likely the stuff she used on us. It’s got bite. I’d hate to get a snout of it.”

But she didn’t sound convinced.

There were more blue-tinged cheeks in the restless crowd, Numair noticed as he lurked alone against the indiscriminate shelter of a building’s overhang. He wasn’t really alone; he truly felt like he was.

Behind him, in the shadows, cloaked in her cowl and her illusions – Numair was deeply unsettled to realise that her Gift was colourless, as Nonny’s seemed to be, as the Gift that had hurt Savigny had been – Raven lurked. He only knew she was there because, occasionally, he’d sense her breath ghosting across the back of his neck from her proximity. She was watching over his shoulder, something which she could easily do; she was almost half an inch taller than him.

“More people wear the paint,” Numair remarked idly. Across the square, as they were as far from the oncoming death as possible, he could just see the flurry of activity that was the black-clothed executioners preparing the hanging. “It’s spreading through the upper cities. I don’t like it.”

“See the rope?” asked Raven, ignoring him. “The assassin dies by the gallows, an ignoble death in Galla. Her body will be buried, not burned. The faithless nobility die by the sword, no matter their treason, and their deaths must be witnessed by their monarch. Then the bodies are cleansed and burned to ensure their souls aren’t trapped into the earth where the Black God cannot find them. At every stage of this farce, they insult her humanity.”

“Is that what you wanted me to see?” Numair retorted. “That they insult her?”

Raven moved closer, her heat against Numair’s back. His heart gave a startled stumble, annoyed with himself as he felt a twinge in his belly at her proximity, her odd scent, her breath on his skin where he couldn’t see her. “See the priests,” she murmured.

Mithros save him, her husky voice was designed to ruin better men than he. There was no compulsion here. Numair simply had no defences against a woman who could step on him like a bug, if she pleased. Despite the terrible locale, and his strong distrust of her, Numair knew that if he’d met her anywhere else and while he wasn’t committed to another, he’d have desired her to the point of madness.

He looked to the priests, hoping no god was actually looking down upon him right now and noticing how he shivered for another. They were an effective distraction from her body so close to his, however, and he found himself leaning away from her as he stared at them. They were clothed in robes of red, which reminded him of the temple hands of Mynoss back in Carthak. It was the same hue, though he doubted Mynoss had a foothold here. They walked through the crowd, their whole faces painted a garish blue in the same hooked style as Don’s Beltane mask. They carried smoke dispensers which belched scent over the crowd. Numair couldn’t hear what they chanted.

“That’s not a ritual I recognise,” he admitted, leaning back and getting the thrill of his life when this bumped him against the hard lines of Raven’s chest. His elbow knocked her corset and he shuffled forward fast, lest he accidently cause her to stab him if his unruly limb jabbed higher. 

Infuriatingly, there wasn’t far to go, and she seemed to be using his shadows to help obscure herself. She followed where he went, just as close. 

“The followers of Yahzed,” said Raven, loathing in her voice. Numair heard a click of a buckle and turned his head, startled, right as she stepped out beside him, mask-less, cowl-less, revealed. As he gazed in wonder at her, she spoke, “He’s a vicious brute of a god, and I do hope he’s listening to me. I should like to see him strike for himself instead of hiding behind the shrivelled hearts of those he fills with hate. He loathes magic, and women, and most especially women who use magic. He claims life for fealty.”

“A sacrificial deity,” Numair recalled through his fascination with the woman beside him. She was just as she’d looked when Nonny had mimicked her, except more. As Numair looked at her now, without the face paint and with her standing shoulder to shoulder with him, he knew there was nothing forgettable about her features. He would have words with Savigny for not warning him of her glory. Surely, by now, Savigny knew that Numair could be felled by beauty. After all, it had been how Savigny had claimed him, with his wolf green eyes and darling smile.

Numair smiled fondly, thinking of him. 

“You’re distractible,” said Raven without looking at him. “You sit upon the stoop of an execution and I can see by your fool expression that you’re daydreaming of your coddled lover.”

“Mine is a happy mind,” he said pleasantly, though to be true it was because he wasn’t looking at the gallows. There was nothing he could do to stop it; he didn’t want to accept it as being there quite yet. “Tell me of Yahzed.”

“I have little to say of him. His followers are reclusive and both I and Savigny have struggled to get eyes inside their temples. Savigny managed to discover that the Rogue’s court is lousy with their followers, though in the act of doing so he lost two of his rooks. Aside from that, we only know what they present publicly, which is that they’re agitating to spread a rumour that magic is a contagion sent by lesser gods to test their faith.”

Numair almost choked. “A  _ what? _ ” he said, stunned. A passing guard glanced at them, but Raven scooped her arm around Numair and leaned comfortably against his side, nestling her head against his shoulder as though they were enjoying a romantic afternoon at a hanging. Her hair was soft against his cheek and smelled of scented oil. The silks of her dress brushed his arm. It was a different dress, he realised as he glanced down at it; this one wasn’t armoured but was embroidered in a similar style to … he twitched as he realised. Nonny’s clothes, and Savigny’s vest. They came from a single source. And she could alter her clothes as well.

“Silliness,” said Raven from where she cosseted him. “Ignore it. They step into the vacuum our boy king leaves in his absence, giving the people the control they’re craving. They’re dangerous, yes, but you can’t fight the appeal of blind faith. It’s easier than starving as an atheist.”

“Fine. Tell me then, why you hate Savigny so much.”

Her fingers closed hard around his arm.

Numair met her gaze without flinching as she tilted her head to eye him with those cold hazel eyes.

“I don’t hate him,” was her eventual, reluctant response. “He frustrates me. We could be so much further if he would stop fighting us. His goals are the same as ours, but his methods are … impossible. He wants to attain freedom without bloodshed, and especially the blood of his king. So long as my people agitate for revenge, he stands between us and his people, which locks us out of the Jewel. We are limited to the inner circle outwards.”

“He never gave me the impression his network was effective.”

“He’s a liar. His people do exactly as he needs. The Hartholms cast a long shadow, though it’s true that since his parents’ deaths that shadow has been withdrawn from within the palace for the first time. He’s playing every side, Salmalín. Everything he does is with a mind to build another layer of protection around his flimsy king. You’re an ally to his cause, currently, but he knows that one day Tortall may stand against Galla, and with that in mind he hides his plots from your eye. My people are the beaten dogs of Galla, and he finds us too mangy for his table so he locks us out of his pretty city and throws us scraps over the gate lest one of us get too close and bite his king. No, I don’t hate him. I wish he were better.”

Numair didn’t answer, but he pondered that. None of it surprised him.

What surprised him was that Raven seemed content to let Savigny get away with it. She was wrong. The nobles in the Jewel weren’t safe, and there were countless murders to prove it. In fact, if he were to look up now, he knew he’d see evidence of that fact being walked towards the gallows, as the bells tolled late noon. He didn’t look. This wasn’t his country; this wasn’t his murder to carry.

“You’re telling me this for a reason,” he decided, thinking of Elspeth. “You want me invested, so your lead-in is appealing to my affection for Savigny. You’re  _ trying  _ to provoke me to protect him. Or, at the very least, you want me to believe that it’s in my best interests to work with you, perhaps if I felt pressured into agreeing to assist you in return for your promise to keep him safe. Am I wrong?”

Raven was watching the gallows.

Numair wouldn’t.

“A king’s first and most important purpose is to feed his people,” she said, gaze locked across the square. He watched her. “Right now, this city is a tinderbox waiting for a single spark to ignite it. Savigny and I work to reduce its flammability, at least for now. Beltane was a reminder that we’re here and we’re angry, but no one will be served by riots during winter. Savigny has contacts I do not. His family has long maintained connections in Maren, in Carthak. Slavers’ routes that, if they’re not carrying slaves, may also be used to smuggle goods. While Galla starves, other countries still drool from the scents created from the unique woods that fill our fiefs and the flowers of the lower south. Savigny opens the lines with bribes and with the threat of his family’s shadows. My people fill those lines with stolen perfumes, gutting the king’s wealth to trade for food from our greedy neighbours. This is what consumes our time currently.”

“That’s how you knew of me,” Numair realised. “You’ve spies in Carthak.”

“Smugglers,” said Raven. “But they have eyes and ears and brains that work. They’re rarely idle. The mountains of Galla create a strange patchwork of fiefs, with plenty of unclaimed spaces to lose people in and plenty of roads we can fill with perfume and silks. I won’t threaten Savigny. We need him to maintain stability and to keep those roads open. But the grain stores of the city are a flashpoint. If it ignites, it will almost certainly be because of those. A good harvest will fill them, the Jewel first, then the inner city, then finally the Bog as an afterthought. A bad harvest … we’ll be reliant on what is already there, which is depleted and vulnerable. Or we’ll be reliant on what he can bring in with our help, if the king doesn’t discover our activities and have us all dancing with our friend over there.”

There was a ripple of excitement from the crowd, some cheering, some booing. Some snarls of anger. Above it all, Numair distantly heard the creak and snap of an unforgiving length of rope.

Finally, Raven looked at him.

“I’m telling you this because Savigny and I aren’t the only forces gathering power,” she said seriously, no trace of flirt in her eyes now. “I certainly didn’t have my people kill the nobility, especially not the babes slaughtered in their beds. Some of mine would, if given the chance, because they revile them. But they didn’t. The concept of Savigny turning on his own is lunatic. The nobles, now I know that there are plots within their ranks to assert influence on the throne and the king’s heirs, but not to murder their own. That leaves external forces, like Maren or Tortall –”

Numair protested, but she ignored him.

“– working to destabilise us and claim Galla as their own. Or it’s an internal force. I suspect Yahzed’s people, or the Rogue’s men. Salmalín, if you wanted Galla to fall, how would you do it?”

Numair thought about it, but the answer wasn’t hard. She’d already given it to him.

“The grain stores,” he said.

“The harvest,” she agreed. “Destroy the grain and the people will rise. I want change, but a rebellion based on starvation doesn’t suit me. I have no interest in freeing a city in its final dying spasms, and my suspicion is that whoever aims to bring us to our knees wants exactly that. While we work to protect and replenish the stores, to protect us against such a blow, we know that there aren’t enough of us to ensure it never occurs at all. Especially when we don’t know exactly who works against us. Now that you know why Savigny and I work so closely together when our aims are anathema, I would like to solicit your assistance. We have stores of our own and we have open routes of underground trade. We have Savigny’s contacts in the lower countries. What we don’t have is security. I desire it. You are Tortallan with the ear of your king, and we need to survive the winter. I don’t need us to be comfortable at the end of it, in fact, it suits me if we’re not. More people will come to me if they’re angry. I do, however, need us alive.”

“Trade with Tortall will involve political manoeuvring,” Numair warned. “Delegations, likely a treaty. I’m honestly baffled that  _ you’re  _ approaching me for this, especially considering how you led into this. You threaten my lover and bring me to see an execution, you talk about how you want to overthrow the monarchy, and then you ask me to strengthen your king? That’s what successful trade will do, you know. If Donatien brings food to the people through agreements with the Tortallans, the people will thank him. From what you’ve said, this is something I would expect from Savigny, not you.”

“I prepare for every eventuality,” was her quiet response. “I’m very patient. And I want to know who is trying to destroy what I’m trying to rebuild. Until that influence is found and removed, the king – and his Gift – must live. Donatien is young and unmarried with no heir. Your king has a daughter. Even the eventual promise of an heir will hold us stable, at least for now, and no one can deny that royal marriages bring with them at least temporary peace even in troubled realms, if they’re enacted cleverly.”

Numair stiffened.

“Kalasin of Conté is nine years old,” he bit out, thinking of the bright girl with her eager curiosity and soft smiles with a surge of furious protectiveness. “Donatien is a twenty-two-year-old man.”

“King Donatien has little interest in women and even less in girls,” snapped Raven. “He doesn’t need to  _ create  _ an heir with the child. Simply imply that he is working towards one. Thirteen years is nothing once she’s reached womanhood. There are no unmarried women of an appropriate rank within Galla who aren’t already close enough in blood to make breeding untenable. Carthak wet its teeth on its spare princesses ten years ago, if you’ve somehow forgotten, leaving your dear Ozorne alone on the bloodied throne. Scanra can offer us nothing. They survive on fish and raiding. That forces Donatien into pleading with Tortall, or Maren. Maren has princesses. Dozens of them, many of whom outrank Donatien in prestige. They’ll give him one if he kneels for them though, because you know what a dynastic marriage between Maren and Galla means.”

Numair tasted bile. He’d never outrun the sound of whips.

He said, “If Donatien takes Galla back to slavery, Jon will slam the borders on him. He won’t trade with slavers.”

“Then tell your king to get in first,” said Raven. “Ensure food to get us through the winter and the promise of an heir to keep the people quiet. Maybe then we’ll survive to Beltane, and maybe then you can keep your lover breathing. Corpses rarely make sensible bedfellows. I hear they make even worse kings.”

Numair, reeling, forgot himself. He glanced ahead, through the dispersing crowd. To the backs of the retreating guards, returning to the palace now their duty was done. To what they’d left behind, discarded.

They’d left the body hanging.

“Tell me,” he said, sick with the sight of it, “if I do as you ask and Jon agrees, what happens to Kalasin when your inevitable rebellion topples the palace and all the people within it? If we assume you’re successful, of course. Is she a structure too?”

Raven didn’t answer, so Numair spoke for her.

“I didn’t think you’d know how to respond to that,” he said. His head ached and he felt sick and sore, and, more than anything else, he felt sorry for the state of the world. “At least a nine-year-old won’t present much of a threat to your new world order. I imagine they’re easily silenced.”

“In all likelihood, the king will be dead before he’s ever asked to lay with the girl,” said Raven with open bitterness, though her features were expressionless. “Your princess will be unharmed and can be returned to her family as such. I can ensure that. If your king is clever, he’ll stall the marriage preparations and she can remain a promise and never a bride. Then she won’t be here when all goes wrong. Is that not what you want?”

“No,” said Numair, wishing he were anywhere but here. “Right now, all I want is to go home. I feel ill.”

Raven studied him. “You are pale,” she commented. “I’ll escort you partway.”

“I doubt it,” said Numair, thinking of Tortall. “It’s a longer walk then you expect.”


	30. The Price of Sugar Spun Hearts

Numair missed Savigny dearly in the dull hour following his return to the estate. There was no sign of Daine. Constant was at the palace. Sav was absent. Numair was alone, and he was sad, and he was more homesick than ever. The shine had gone out of the day; he was haunted by dead kings and children used as political currency. The worst part, he knew, was that Jon wouldn’t dismiss Raven’s suggestion out of hand. Thayet might. Jon would consider it. Perhaps he was right to. What was one girl’s happiness when placed against the stability of two nations, and the loss of generations of Gallans, those born and those still to be, who would be pulled into the sinkhole of a freshly enslaved Galla?

Numair hated politics. 

He curled up in the chair behind his desk and grieved for Kally, even though there was no certainty that her parents would sell her to Galla’s failing crown, or that Donatien would even accept her. He wished Savigny were here to ask, or –

“You look terrible,” said Daine, lingering in the doorway with her eyes concerned.

Numair uncurled so fast he got dizzy again, but he recovered quickly: “Daine,” he said, tone snapping with his haste, “you know Donatien, don’t you?”

“Suppose,” was her wary reply. “Well enough, though less so recently. Why?”

“What would be his response to being offered a child as a bride?” he asked. “She’s nine now, so there’d be years between the offer and the marriage but … she’s so young. She’s only  _ nine _ .”

Daine studied him. “I forget somehow how soft your heart is,” she said, coming to his desk and perching upon it. “They marry younger than nobles in the slums, you know. Not nine, but close enough. Nine is definitely young enough to begin offering girls out if the parents are fair desperate.” Numair must have looked devastated, because she added: “Don wouldn’t, though. If that’s what you’re worried about. He’s turned down brides for being too young before, though Savigny said it was mostly because he didn’t want to marry at all. I think it was because Don never pictured himself married to anyone but Savigny. What did Raven say to you?”

“Nothing good,” said Numair, though he felt a modicum of cheer return despite the gloomy reminder that perhaps Savigny’s dreamed-of future had never involved him in it. Pushing that aside as an untenable thought anyway, he decided to trust her; she’d gone with him into the Raven’s nest, she deserved to know.

So he told her. He told her of Raven’s stealing, of Savigny’s smugglers in Maren and Carthak. Of the potential for slavery to hook its insidious claws into the mountainous heart of the continent they shared. He told her of Kalasin. He told her everything he remembered, until his heart was lighter for the sharing of it.

When he was done, she was thoughtful.

“That’s politics, which I don’t have much of a mind for,” she said, drawing her knees up, toes curled around the edge of the desk. “I’m not pleased with what Sav’s got himself into, though. Smuggling is a good way to the gallows.”

“They behead nobility,” said Numair offhand, thinking of what Raven had said.

“Ta,” muttered Daine with a cross look. “I feel so much better now. What do we do about it, then? If Sav could solve it with money, I likely think he would have by now.”

“I don’t know,” said Numair morosely. But he shook it off. “Ah, speaking of … we should talk about what happened this morning.”

Quick as a whip, Daine retorted, “We should talk about Carthak. I don’t think you’ve told me or Sav anything about what happened over there, have you? You seemed so scared that Raven would.”

The thought of Carthak, even now, bit at his bones with iron teeth. He stood and paced.

He decided it was time.

“Emperor of Carthak,” he murmured, mind a million miles away. He committed without thinking about it, bringing the scent of the hot sun on stripped skin and the feel of wet sand under his bare feet into the hallowed home created for him by the Gallans he’d never expected to love so much, or for them to return that feeling. “Ozorne Muhassin Tasikhe, is his name. It’s how I knew him. Oh, I knew he was a prince, I suppose. Academically. In the same way that sometimes I see Savigny standing at a particular angle and a part of my mind reminds me that he’s nobility. Ozorne’s the emperor mage now. He was … just Ozorne back then. We were children, Daine, you must understand. It’s powerful, the way the people who love you when you’re a child shape you.”

He turned to her, finding her wide-eyed and quiet on his desk, perched like she was about to leap forward and embrace the sky. She was human all the way through, same as him, but it scared him right then to look at her and realise just how tentative her grip on the ground was. 

He said, softly, “I’ll tell you about Carthak if you tell me about your ma, and what came after.”

“You know about Snowsdale,” she said.

His reply, nonchalant, careful, and applied with two strides forward and the touch of his hand to hers, was, “Do I? I never knew it was called Snowsdale.”

There was never really a question of what he was going to do when she said ‘yes’. He, of course, gave himself completely to her, as he’d warned her so long ago he would if she welcomed him, as he’d known in his soul he would when she’d first offered her hand. 

It wasn’t a story he could tell while sitting still. He paced while telling it. His restless hands pulled at anything he could. He fiddled with quills and papers, he opened books and closed them until his desk was completely awry, and he tugged at his hair until he knew it was teased out into insanity. Through it all, Daine was silent. She let him go. She was good like that, he knew. There was an easy knowing of how best to let him unwind inside her, as though she’d been watching him his whole life and knew him best out of anyone. He loved that, how she made him feel seen.

“I thought I’d left it behind,” Numair confessed. He was at Savigny’s desk, and he’d just finished telling her of how his parents, common cloth merchants, had discovered his prestigious Gift and sent him away forever when he was six years old, rehomed to the collective parenting of the entire University of Carthak. “Everything in Carthak, just like Tyra. I was born in Tyra, but I feel no connection to it, no formative memories. I don’t feel like I  _ ever  _ did. I loved the university so much, I never looked back. And then I was thrown out of that and came to Tortall and I guess I figured, eventually, it would be exactly the same. Carthak would stop mattering. But it doesn’t, does it? Your past follows you. Everywhere I look I keep finding ghosts of it, suffocating the people around me. I see Ozorne in Donatien, Ozorne who was so traumatised by his father’s murder that he twisted himself into hating an entire group of people. Savigny, gods, Savigny is me, trying to outrun a love so big it consumed my entire being. I would have  _ burned  _ for Ozorne, Daine, and I truly, nearly did. Varice … I see you in Varice, you know, though I don’t think you’d have liked her much. Which is a pity. If you’d grown up around her, you’d have loved her heart. She just … all she wanted was to be herself, but the people around her, us, we were all so grand and exciting and big and we just dragged her along in our wake, leaving her black and blue in our magnificent ruin.”

He looked down, finding that he had a book in his hand that Savigny had been reading – a history of Tortall, which made his heart feel strange to see it – and he opened it to the page which had been marked. The silence between them stretched. He couldn’t speak; in the middle of the baring of Arram Draper, he’d found that the page where Savigny had set it down was marked with the delicate petals of a perfectly pressed, somewhat crushed, yellow flower. It was as small as the day Numair had given it to him.

It was only when he heard the soft sigh that he looked up, eyes damp, heart wary. Daine was still on the desk, though she’d drawn her knees to her chest and perched her chin upon them, mouth buried in her folded arms as she watched him. 

And Savigny was at the door, looking washed-out and strained, his clothes in disarray and his hair dishevelled. He looked like he’d ridden hard to come home fast. He looked exhausted. He looked like he’d fought gods to get here.

He looked, Numair thought, better than anything Numair had ever seen.

Numair closed the book gently on the flower and set it back down next to the half-built construct of the hare in the glass orb Numair had bought for him, the twin of the one Numair had hidden in the Gift-locked lowest drawer of his own desk. 

“I loved Ozorne since I was ten years old,” he admitted for the first time. “I loved Varice too, but Ozorne was different. He and I, we were going to change the world together. I believed that so completely, I think it changed me fundamentally. I shaped my soul around it. We were going to change the university, change Carthak, change everything. We didn’t even know he was going to inherit at that point – he was nowhere near first in line – but Ozorne always said to me, as powerful as we’d be together, who could stop us? We didn’t need a throne. We weren’t completely like you and Donatien, Sav. I know no one believes it, and gossips must gossip, but we never entered into a sexual relationship, technically.”

“Technically,” said Daine, her voice muffled but tone grinning.

“We wanted it,” said Numair. He wasn’t smiling. He was shivering. He’d buried this so deep, with the whips and the sand and the point of a sword against his trembling pulse. “I mean, I presume … no. I know. I know he wanted it too. He just …”

Savigny wasn’t saying a thing, Mithros damn him, and Numair couldn’t stand it.

“Carthak isn’t like here,” he said, looking at his feet. “Oh, same sex lovers existed in relative peace where they did. But not a prince. Never a prince. And when we touched, those few times we did – and they were terrible, and glorious – those were the times I really  _ knew _ that Ozorne was a prince. It was just like when he spoke of the rebels who killed his father. I could see the trained hate just searing below his skin, like he was tracing it onto me, and it made me so ill I could barely breathe. But I loved him, and craved him, like he was the only thing giving me shape. Without him, there wasn’t a world worth changing. So I let him lay me down and I let his touch sear me open, flay me right to the bone. When he’d inevitably realise he was dangerously close to doing something that constituted sex, or if he became aroused, or if he saw me aroused, he’d lash out at himself, step back and verbally eviscerate himself while I sat there feeling like every single word was actually meant for me. It was like being hollowed out and refilled with hate, and I never said a single word to stop him. I just didn’t know how. Eventually, I couldn’t stand it, and I rejected his touch. I told him I didn’t want him. I lied. I think it’s what he wanted me to say all along, even though it was a lie, and he.” He stopped, shaking his head to clear his mind of the poison inherent in the memory, before mumbling a weak, “We were older then.”

Numair sucked in a choking breath. It seemed he was the only one in the room breathing at all. But he couldn’t stop, and he couldn’t look at Savigny, and if he didn’t spit the tale out now he’d be tasting blood all night.

“I think that was the first time I’d ever rejected him,” he continued. “The first time he touched me I was fourteen, him sixteen. The last time he was twenty. It was three months after he became emperor, and I truly do not understand how I didn’t see how those four years had changed him. Even now, I don’t understand. I don’t think I saw it happening. I was blinded by how much I believed in him. Even when we realised he was going to inherit, that the other heirs were dying so quickly, so strangely, it didn’t change how I viewed him. He just decided that he would be emperor, and I, of course, would be his mage.”

“He decided,” intoned Savigny, voice flat.

“I went along with it because I couldn’t bear to deny him anything.” Numair felt just how he had then, like he was open and ready for them to cause him bone-deep harm if this went wrong. “I mean it. He became emperor. I became a black robe mage, and he presented me grandly as the jewel of his court. That night he came to my chambers and he was alive with everything that was ahead of us, his plans for us. He was so young and accomplished and  _ recklessly  _ confident and he just wanted everything, to possess it all, to sculpt it exactly as it pleased him. As he was pacing and telling me all the beautiful, terrible things we’d do with our powers combined, I realised that he wasn’t someone I knew. Then he demanded I bed him. None of those shy, hateful, terrified touches of our university years, where we never got further down than our hips and never, ever looked each other in the eye. He had everything he wanted, except me, and he aimed to rectify that. Princes couldn’t love men. But emperors, emperors can have whoever they damn well please, and it pleased him to have me. To shape me as he wanted. Just to hear him say it, I would have given anything to have that too. But I said no. I knew that it had nothing to do with whether he was a prince or an emperor, and everything to do with  _ him  _ and that hate that was under his skin waiting to burn me. Him, and the people who shaped him, just like I was being shaped. I rejected him, and the hate that he cosseted within him because he saw nothing wrong with it. It was, looking back, cataclysmic.” 

In the silence that etched into the room, Savigny slipped in. He crossed the space between them soundlessly and came to where Numair stood, rigid and afraid. When he reached him, he didn’t say a word; he just came up to Numair and tucked himself into the cove that was left of Numair’s chest, wrapping his arms around him and leaning his forehead on Numair’s shoulder. It took Numair’s breath away. It gave him the strength to continue.

“We fought, from then on. He demanded I obey him. I dared him to make me. I never really thought his love could turn to hate, but I suppose that was because I felt so sorry for him that I didn’t realise he’d never hated himself at all. Those words had always been for me. They were his way of making sure I pitied him enough to never see the danger of his arrogance. I discovered that there was one type of person Ozorne hated more than the Sirajit, more than he hated men who aroused him. He hated, more than anyone else, people who told him no.”

Savigny’s grip around him was crushing, but Numair needed it so much he tightened his own arms back until he felt Savigny begin to breathe differently. He wanted to be crushed. He wanted to know that there was no letting go. 

He finished his sorry tale with the most hateful part of it.

“Raven was right,” he said, feeling Savigny give a gruesome, full-body flinch at the sound of her name. There was no time to attend to it yet, not while Numair was still in danger of bleeding out. He had to close the wound first; he had to cauterise it for good. “I abandoned so many when I fled Carthak. They’ll all be there when I fall to the Peaceful Realms, waiting to know why I let them die so young. There was a nobleman from Tyra who loved the stars so much he once undressed me only so that he could have enough skin to paint me in his favourites. I loved him because he made me feel like a Tyran for the first time since I was six, like he was a whisper of a home I hadn’t realised I’d missed before he’d kissed me. He was beautiful, he was two years older than I was, and we were in a sexual relationship for four months before Ozorne found out. Three days after that, my Tyran was thrown from a horse and his neck was broken. He never liked horses, oddly enough. I don’t think he even knew how to ride, let alone for pleasure in the middle of the night. At the time, I was only glad that maybe the last thing he’d seen were the stars. Two servants died too that month, both ones who’d known of my warming his bed. They drowned. I was so stupid. There was a boy – a man, by then – who I’d flirted with in university. The first male I’d ever kissed, incidentally. He came to visit me to see for himself the glamourous heights I’d reached. The palace guards found treasonous documents in his room one night when he was in my bed. Ozorne had always hated him. My lover, that idiot man who loved to sing even though he was bad at it and who taught me how to kiss and who wanted to take his sister across the sea to Tortall where she’d never see a single slave, was dragged from my arms while I swore to prove his innocence. The way he looked at me, I think he knew I couldn’t. Ozorne had him executed a week later, by the sword. I stood beside him. I watched. I loved women too, of course, but none of them ever … died. Only the men. It was likely that this was why I never realised, until it was over. Until that moment. It was my first male lover’s blood in the sand. I watched it pool and then I looked at Ozorne and he, while I was openly weeping beside him, having  _ grovelled  _ and  _ begged _ for him to spare the man … he was smiling. He was so happy to have denied me. This was his revenge, for turning him out of my bed. And I realised how many had died because I waited so long to say no.”

Numair buried his face in Savigny’s hair, shocked to realise how grimy it was. Savigny was a mess. His eyes were reddened, there was dirt in his hair, and he smelled of stale water as though he’d bathed in a hurry somewhere unclean. If Numair focused on his inhale, really focused, he could smell traces of a sickly smoke on his clothes, a meaty, recalcitrant stink. 

“He turned on me, eventually,” rasped Numair, voice gone and his cheeks coming up grimy from where the dirt in Savigny’s hair was sticking to the wet traces upon his skin. “Of course he did. I was always his to punish and oh, Mother spare me the memory, did he punish me. He tore everything I loved away. He ruined my name. He turned those who loved me against me, and those who wouldn’t turn he killed, or found excuses to put them into the slave pits. He spared so few. And when no one would speak for me anymore out of fear, he declared I would be executed for my crimes. He came down to where I was half-starved in the cell he’d had them put me in, in chains to cripple my Gift. I’d been there, it felt like, years. In reality it was weeks, but they were long weeks. There wasn’t a light, or a privy, or room to turn about. It was just me and the stone floor and the endless dark. He flung open the door and blinded me and examined me in as I wallowed in my filth. All he said to me was that he could fix this, if I’d let him. He’d bring me back to life. Or he’d kill me. He said there was no choice. I couldn’t even tell him there had never been a choice for me – I would  _ never  _ be his battlemage. By then, I’d ruined my voice by screaming. And he put his sword to my throat.”

“Stop,” said Savigny, his whole expression cracked open like he was taking actual, realised, bodily hits from hearing this. “You don’t need to tell us this, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I gave this information to her, I didn’t think of how it would hurt. I never  _ think _ . It’s too much. You’re giving us too much.”

Numair couldn’t. If he stopped now, he’d drown.

“I escaped,” he choked out. “Please don’t ask me how. I ran. I should have stayed to save them but I was just, I still  _ loved  _ him. I don’t understand that. How could I? But I did. I couldn’t hurt him. So I ran until my feet were bloody, and then I ran even further, and didn’t stop until I hit Tortall. That’s it. That’s everything I have to tell. I loved a monster and he savaged me for it, and I don’t think I’m ever really going to shake off how it changed me. But every person Ozorne kills, every death attributable to him from that day onward, it’s another person I’m going to meet on the other side and have to explain why my love was worth their life. There’ll be enough for an eternity of retribution by the time I’m there.”

He hid his face, once again, in Savigny’s hair. There was no shame in tears, even for men, but he didn’t feel he’d earned these ones. 

It was Daine who spoke first, breaking that tormented silence. 

“There was a man in Snowsdale who courted my ma,” she said, eyes fixed on a point somewhere around Numair’s torso, like she was too sorry to meet his gaze. “He taught me bits and pieces. How to string a bow. How to hunt. I loved him fair enough, especially as a girl when it seemed he’d be happy enough to marry Ma and love me back. Then when I was out delivering medicine one day, bandits came and killed my ma and my grandda and all the animals that tried to fight to save them. I hate bandits. So I buried them, and no one came to help, and I sat there alone, and no one came to find me, and then I went mad. I went to the wolves, because no one was sorry like I was that my family was dead and I wanted them to be. I wanted  _ someone  _ to feel  _ something.  _ It was so obscene that I was the only person who’d been kicked open like that. I told the wolves what had been done and took them to see everything the bandits had ruined. They were angry too. And then we killed the bandits together, and I liked every minute of their dying.” She bit at her nails, Savigny turning minutely against Numair’s chest so he could look at her. Numair, even in his momentous grief, wondered if Sav had ever heard her tell it like this before. “Anyway, I can’t tell a story in a way that makes you feel so much how it must have hurt like you just did, Numair, so I’m not going to try. The point is that this man who could have been my da, who loved my ma at least enough to warm her bed and give me pretties to make me smile, when he found out where I’d gone and where I was, and  _ what  _ I was, he came and he lured me away from the pack. He called my name and said he’d seen my ruined home. He said he had a bedroom for me at his house and if I came out, he’d take me home and fix everything. He’d make it better. And I was so sorry to be left alone that I went out to him. He tried to kill me.”

Savigny went rigid. He snarled a curse.

That answered that, thought Numair. He hadn’t known.

With a dull shrug, Daine continued, though she was chewing her nails right down to the bloodied quicks. “He said I was an animal now and I needed to be put down for my own good. Maybe he wasn’t so wrong, at least then. But I don’t think it’s so strange, that you loved your Ozorne even when he hurt you. I think it’s something we all do, picking loves that bite. It’s just something that comes with trusting people so much you let them close enough to cut you.”

“You were so scared of us, when we found you,” said Savigny, still huddled against Numair as he said this. “I never knew why. I thought it was just because you’d been alone so long.”

“I guess a bit of that,” replied Daine, though Numair could tell by her eyes that she was about to be ferociously honest. “But I also thought you were going to be just like that man, calling me out with honey words to hide the knife behind your back. I was so tired by then. I figured if you really were going to put me down gentle, what was being lost? I just wanted to sleep. But then you and Don, you both took me home and you were just … you put everything back together in my brain, all the bits of Daine I’d lost to my grief and the wolves. Maybe not how they were before. But they were enough to hold water, and I’ve never told you how thankful I am for that. I went from having no home and no family to having brothers who said they’d make homes for me wherever I wanted to go. I was so scared to love you both, but I did so fast, and I still do. I’m mad that it took a bird-faced gissy in an armoured dress to remind me that I should tell you because maybe someone made you believe otherwise, just like Numair’s Ozorne did to him.”

Against Numair’s chest, Savigny was quiet and drawn, existing in a state of stunned paralysis. He didn’t seem to know what to do with himself, so Numair rubbed a hand between his shoulder-blades and focused on holding him how he obviously needed to be held. A great tiredness had descended upon Numair, who felt like he’d aged ten years since he’d woken up this morning, and he could see that weight settling on Savigny’s shoulders too. 

“I’m so blind,” Savigny finally said, eyes closed until he opened them to give Daine a dazed smile. “Such a fool. I love you too. I’m so sorry it took me so long to say it. When I heard where you’d been and what had happened, and, ah. It’s like I keep forgetting that we’re all so finite. There’s so little time together.”

An absolutely dreadful feeling lurched into being in Numair’s core, like he’d taken all the foreboding of Raven’s melodrama and mixed them into a concoction with just how easy those words had come from Savigny’s mouth, before drinking it in one sickening gasp. He didn’t know how to explain the feeling, except that as he thought about it he realised it was familiar. It was how he’d felt looking up at the dazzling shape of Ozorne at the mouth of Numair’s cage; it was the point of that sword on Numair’s throat; it was counting the cost of his life on others. It was leaving Varice behind and it was killing Arram Draper so that Numair Salmalín could live. It was him accepting love that was bad for him simply so he wouldn’t be without it; it was Daine doing the same; it was Savigny; it was Donatien.

It was grieving a man who was alive in his arms, but who wouldn’t always be.

For a lingering, gutting moment, Numair believed completely that Savigny was going to die, if only because with that single sentence Savigny had confirmed that he believed the same.

Savigny took Numair to bed despite the early hour, so devastated they both were by each other. Numair told him all that had happened as they went, though Savigny said little on the execution and less on Raven. He didn’t even comment on Raven’s plan for the marriage of Donatien to Kalasin. Numair wished he’d say something, about anything.

“Undress,” said Savigny to Numair as Numair paced before the fireplace in their bedroom, wound up into ferocity by his fear of losing everything before him. “Lie down on the bed. I need to show you something.”

“I’m not in the mood for sex,” Numair snapped, uncharacteristically sharp about it. Savigny flinched, which was so horrible to see Numair felt as guilty as though he’d reached over and slapped his companion. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound like that. I’m just, today has been a  _ lot _ .”

“I don’t want to have sex with you,” said Savigny, eyes downcast. Numair almost staggered when he saw they were bright. “This isn’t a seduction. I want to undo something that’s been done that’s  _ wrong _ . I’m so angry it’s been done. Please let me help.”

Numair was baffled by this request, but he couldn’t deny it. Not when Sav’s expression was so plaintive. He undressed and crawled upon the bed, astounded when Savigny joined him. Sav had never, in all the time he’d known him, come to bed grimy. 

“Lie upon your stomach,” Savigny murmured, his voice low, his hands soft, as he adjusted Numair’s position and arranged the bedding to support his body. Numair did as he was told, despite his confusion. This confusion surmounted as Savigny’s weight rested slightly upon him, the other man straddling him across his hips.

“This feels very much like a precursor to sex,” Numair quipped, vaguely amused.

“I am not an explicit man,” said Savigny, silencing him. “Everything that occurs within me stays that way. I don’t express my affection freely, nor my fears. I could never in my life do as you did today and allow those close to me to see me so … clearly. The closest I have ever gotten is twice in my life, once with Don and once with you, in the dark. I … today, Numair, I let Raven use information she obtained through me to hurt you. I thought I could detach from that and let her do so. I didn’t think it would hurt you as much as I realise now that it did, and I certainly didn’t expect to feel as I do about it. If I could take it back, I would.”

As he was speaking, he had indeed started touching Numair, but not at all in a way Numair had been touched before. He was firm but yielding, working Numair’s muscles as Numair had seen the knights of Corus had done to them after a hard day in the saddle. It was, at first, somewhat obscene in its intimacy. Numair felt quite ashamed of his nascent arousal, as disconnected from his brain as it was. Then it became something else, something new. It was Savigny touching Numair to make him feel good, to undo the tension of his grand confession and release all the poison it had built up in him. Savigny had seen him flayed open, and now he was the flame that touched Numair so kindly to close the wound. 

“Apologies without action are manipulation,” said Savigny, sliding his hand slow down Numair’s spine as he bowed close and followed his touch with a series of melting kisses. Numair was done; he puddled into the blankets with a quiet moan and let Sav do as he pleased. “I can’t undo my idiocy. Raven knows what she knows and her actions in the future must reflect that information. But it only seems fair that I give you back your power. I can’t do so for her. I know so little of her that I can share. But I can give you power over me.”

Numair’s eyes snapped open from where he’d closed them, lulled into sedition by the way Savigny’s hands were now working his hips, his rear. He slid up Numair’s body once more, to his shoulders, leaning forward to kiss along the divot of Numair’s shoulder-blades. 

“I am touching you,” Savigny breathed against Numair’s skin, his breath hot and his sweat musky, an unfamiliar, undone body against Numair. “I am touching you as he did, seeing you as he did. You said he filled you with hate. I  _ despise  _ that. How could anyone look at you and feel hateful? You are gorgeous, Numair Salmalín. You arouse me in every way. I love looking upon your body and seeing where it is lean from use, and where it is soft. I love seeing how your life has shaped you.”

Numair realised he was whispering small blasphemous utterances into the blankets, his fingers cramped as they gripped the bedding hard to try hold himself down. He might lose his grip with the ground completely if he let go; no one had ever spoken to him like this. He had no idea what to do with this information. His clever brain, the pride of Carthak and Tortall, had shut down completely.

“Your mind is unique,” Savigny was still saying, Numair closing his eyes and feeling like he was rolling in the warmest, softest existence possible. “It dazzles me. I look at you so often and wish I could experience even a single iota of what it is to be you, how spectacular your world must be, filled as it is with so much kindness and honesty. You are the man I realise I’ve always desired to be. I never realised I could  _ be  _ a man until you arrived in my life, truly. I was nothing until you gave me shape, until you showed me that there’s a shape I fit into, a mind that’s still recognisable as being connected to a body that I don’t feel a part of. Numair, understand this if nothing else – I wish I could see me how you see me. With Don, I am just a heart and a Gift. You … you look at me and you see me, not a sword or an illusion or a half-painted face. No one else has done that.”

The weight of Sav’s head rested upon Numair’s shoulder, Numair wiggling around under him until he could roll himself far enough over to bring his hand to his lover’s cheek and hold him tenderly.

“I don’t know what I’m saying,” Savigny said with a sad, damp smile. “I feel so silly. You must think this is all so trite.”

“I think,” said Numair, so carefully, realising that right now he was handling a moment as fragile as spun sugar, “that you’re trying to tell me who  _ you  _ think you are. Not Donatien. Not your parents, or Constant, or Daine –”

“Daine knows,” rasps Savigny. Only now did Numair see how dark his eyes were, the green a sliver of colour around pupils wide with, he assumed since he felt no weight against his leg, fear. “She’s always known me best. Don has seen glimpses. Cole suspected. He says –”

Numair cut him off: “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

Savigny was breathing so fast; his heart rattled against Numair like a rabbit in a trap. He was gulping to try suck more air down, their skin sealed together by panicked sweat. “I lied,” said Savigny through the barest chatter of his teeth, so viciously was he beginning to tremble. “The opal. I lied to you. I know it. It was a teaching aid.”

“Savigny, no,” breathed Numair, kissing everything of him he could reach.

“It made it easier to learn rote lessons,” stammered Savigny. “Or to soothe nightmares. I had many of those. He’d tell me to feel calm and I would. He told me I could fight it if I truly didn’t want it to influence me, I was powerful enough, even at eight. Though I don’t remember when it began. Maybe I was younger.”

Numair almost bit his tongue.

“It was  _ just _ a teaching aid,” Savigny said, though he was so out of air he had to lower his head to lean it against Numair again so he could, briefly, focus on breathing. “He loved me, Numair. I didn’t have adults who loved me. Just Cole. I  _ needed  _ him. It’s so lonely to be a child in a world where all love is conditional, except Don’s. Don’s was never conditional. He loved me exactly as I was. I even tested his love, as we grew older. I did it to Daine too. I knew, by then, that I was something damaged. I wanted to show them that they should be cleverer with their love, that it  _ should  _ be conditional so that they would know when to withdraw it before I soiled them with my depravity.”

“I hate this,” said Numair dully, Savigny flinching again. “No, I don’t mean you. I don’t hate you. There is nothing conditional about I feel about you, and I’m begging you to continue. Tell me anything you need to. I just hate that he made you believe this. It’s not true.”

“Cole taught me that your Gift is given by the gods, a way to show that you’re a being pure of spirit,” said Savigny into Numair’s shoulder. He seemed overwhelmed; his trembling had stopped. “He told me this so early I believed it completely. He said my powerful Gift was a sign of how good I was, how worthy of love. I craved love. I still do, but it was worse then. Children are greedy creatures for love. I don’t think they grow correctly without it. And he told me that a Gift would reject a person who was wrong. If they were twisted, somehow. But it would never be me.  _ I  _ was too important. I was Donatien’s Gift. I was, he told me, perfect. I believed him.”

“You were a child.”

“Yes,” said Savigny with an audible swallow. “Of course, yes. He also held the stone as he said it. I told you. It was a teaching aid.”

And, just like that, Numair was in a mind to commit murder.

“Thirteen is such a strange age,” Savigny continued. “I don’t think I need to tell you how bizarre your body suddenly becomes. I … suspect, from how Donatien talked about being thirteen, that I did not quite come out of those years with the same relationship with myself as he did. Very quickly I become convinced that I was trapped within something that didn’t fit me, a shape that’s wrong. It permeated everything. My clothes were wrong. My passions were ill-suited. Diversions which were fun as a child, learning swordplay for example, began to alter me further. I hated the muscles they gave me, the way they made me look. I hated my voice, how I lost my ability to sing. I love to sing and now my voice is like that of tortured metal. I retrained it, but it’s not as it was. I can barely stand it. I began to desire others, but I hated the way girls touched me. There is little shame in Galla for lovers of the same sex, as I know other countries have, but even so I felt absurd with how I fell into ways with men. Gallans still have our peculiarities, Numair. Men might desire men, but they must do it as  _ men _ . Not whatever I was doing.”

Numair took the lull in his speech to speak, though he was still cautious. This was such a delicate conversation, and he was not entirely sure he was doing well.

“There are those born into bodies that don’t suit them,” he said with such fervent, tender care, dreading that he would step wrong and drive Savigny back into the voices of those who would decry him. “Men born in bodies of women and the other way around. Maybe –”

Savigny pulled a face, struggling to turn away as though to hide it. “No,” he snapped, wincing at his tone. “I didn’t mean to snap. I just, I’ve had people try to tell me that. That mine is a woman’s mind settled into the wrong body. It’s not right. I’ve tried it. I once invited Donatien to the Bog with me, to a location where I had maintained friendships with the dancers there. I was seventeen. They taught me how to dress as a woman, how to shape my face differently with paints and shadows. As he made friends among the ladies, I dressed myself in silks and crept behind him to place a hand on his arm – I thought, as I did it, that here was the condition. He would find it so bizarre. But he looked at me and knew me instantly and just kept looking at me. He was so quiet, examining me from my feet to my face. I felt so stupid. Like a child playing dress up. Do you know what he said?”

“I dread to know,” muttered Numair, who felt like he’d taken a severe battering to his faith in other humans today.

“He said,” said Sav, “I like that colour on you.”

Numair blinked. 

A spark of faith returned.

“On the way home, he asked if that was who I was,” Sav continued, looking up at the ceiling as he spoke. “And he said that, if I wished, I could hide gowns and paints of my own in his room, so Cole wouldn’t find them. He said he didn’t mind. It was kind, but I didn’t take him up on the offer. It wasn’t me anyway. Just a face I liked to wear. I’ve gotten distracted. I was trying to tell you who I am … when I was thirteen, my Gift began to hurt. It burned me. I was so scared they’d find out and realise I was soiled, that my Gift was rejecting me. I began wearing clothes that covered me so they wouldn’t see my skin burning, and I taught myself to ignore the pain. I knew if they saw it, they’d take Don away from me. I avoided using my Gift where I could. I was so good at hiding it, no one ever knew. My parents died without knowing why I’d suddenly grown so reluctant to use my Gift, so withdrawn. A different person. Not their son.”

There it was. Numair sighed into the quiet.

“Cole did it,” he said, since Savigny seemed disinclined to admit it.

“Yes,” was the whispered answer. “But I loved him, Numair. And I still do. But he told me my Gift would burn me if it rejected me, and then he ensured that it did so that I’d always believe I was wrong. And now I’m a man, or something like one, who doesn’t know if he should be in breeches or a gown because neither fits the shape I’ve grown into. And then, in the dark, without even looking at me, you told me you’d love me no matter what that shape was. I think that’s the first time I’ve ever believed in the potential for that, at least since I was thirteen.”

Numair kissed him gentler than he’d ever kissed anything before, in his entire existence.

“Thank you for telling me,” he said quietly, laying that thought into every touch of his lips. “Even if you don’t know fully what it is. Daine knows?”

Savigny smiled, a faraway smile. “She’s a very passable seamstress when she needs to be, which I suppose comes about when you unexpectedly grow animal limbs. I don’t know how she figured it out, but she altered several of her clothes to fit me growing up. We’d fool around pretending I was teaching her ladylike things a girl growing up somewhat noble should know, but we both knew it was an excuse for me to play with them too. I loved the things she picked for me. They made me softer, but not feminine. This makes no sense. You must think I’m ridiculous. This is supposed to be about healing you, not my baffling relationship with my own body.”

Numair pondered it. “It makes sense, Daine understanding you. Hers is a body that somewhat abruptly ceases to fit her properly as well, often in quite astounding ways.”

This earned a soft laugh, that Numair treasured.

“Sav,” he said seriously, sitting up so that the other man had to crane his neck to peek up at him. “What you’ve told me tonight, I don’t want you to think this gives me power over you. This is not information I would abuse. It’s not information you should give  _ anyone  _ under the assumption they’ll hurt you with it. You told me who you are. I think that person is beautiful, and I love him very much – and I cannot abide the idea that you’ve been taught to use it as a weapon to cut yourself with. I’m not going to do a single thing with what I’ve learned today unless you want me to do something with it. It hasn’t altered a single thing about the way I love you.”

Sav shook his head, smiling but in a mildly confused way. “This is exactly what I meant,” he said. “How could that man have been hateful to you? It’s unfathomable.”

“I thought you were going to tell me Donatien had been hateful to you, when he saw you,” Numair admitted, grimacing. “Perhaps Ozorne soured me more towards people than I thought he had.”

“No. Don has never been cruel. He’s always taken people exactly as they’ve presented themselves to him. Once he loved me, he loved me as a man or a woman or anything in between, wherever I landed.” Sav shivered, frowning. The hair on his arms was partially upright, as though he’d gotten a fright. Numair stroked his fingers along the soft skin of his inner arm to help soothe him. “That’s it, isn’t it? Cole made me believe in my own wrongness, altering my beliefs in myself using his parasitic magic, the same as he taught me to do to Constant. And he cemented those beliefs with compulsion using the opals, the same opals in Don’s rooms. Don has  _ never  _ been hateful. Now, suddenly, he fears mages so savagely that it’s become loathing? That makes no sense, unless it’s compelled. Cole is compelling him.”

That last sentence was so flat that Numair could sense the building anger, simmering underneath the calm of Savigny’s stare.

“I believe so,” said Numair, sadly. He wished it were different. At least, he supposed, this meant they could undo it if Donatien let them close enough to do so. How much damage could compulsion do, even if layered with the aftereffects of the fearwood? 

Savigny was limp in the bedding, wrung out with the exhaustion of their confessions. He didn’t look like the realisation had rejuvenated him at all. It hadn’t given him a burst of fearful hope. He just looked tired. Numair, looking at him at that moment, wondered what it truly was that Savigny wished to see when he looked in a mirror, and if he’d ever somehow find it. He wished he could help. It was horrible to realise he was so powerful, but there were so many things he simply couldn’t fix. 

“Don loved me in every way he could,” said Savigny, turning his head and closing his eyes, barely moving as he sunk himself in the reality of what he was saying. “And I failed him just the same. If I’d told someone, my parents, the queen,  _ anyone,  _ of what Cole did to me, he’d never have gotten to Don. It really is true. It doesn’t matter how much you love someone; it won’t stop you hurting them. I’m just as bad as Cole is … no wonder I never rejected him.”

“You’re not Cole,” said Numair. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

But he could tell that, no matter how far they’d come today, it wasn’t far enough. Savigny didn’t believe him, and maybe he never would.

No Gift in the world was big enough to fix that.


	31. Prince of Nowhere; King of No One

Donatien had been dreaming since his mother died, it felt. He was entirely aware of this, in the usual way one was aware that they were dreaming, though, of course, much as he was about everything else in his life, he was of two minds about it. At least. Sometimes more.

Today, it was Savigny. And it was Constant. 

Constant, Don reminded himself, was not a dream. Constant was real. Don must attend to what was real.

He attended. It was a dizzying effort. Constant had been speaking and was now waiting for a reply.

“I missed that,” Don said, looking up. He found that he was sitting in the private parlour attached to his new chambers with a cold bowl of breakfast in front of him. A goblet to the right of the bowl held wine, which he knew Magisri Ossika would have medicated for his health.

_ “It’s poison,”  _ said Savigny calmly from where he sat to Don’s right, though, when Don jerked around to stare, no one was there but Earnest sloppily demolishing a bowl of meat scraps.

“Don,” said Constant again, Don flinching back. Constant was studying him with his expression uneasy. His hair was growing out, Don noticed. Time had passed without him, while he’d been dreaming. And Constant was older. How old was he now? “ _ Don _ .”

“Sorry, I’m listening. Continue.”

Don drank the wine with a wince. It was doctored.

_ “Poisoned.” _

Don gritted his teeth and drank it slower, with insolence. 

“You didn’t sleep again last night,” said Constant, standing and pacing. Don stared at him. It was harder to slip away when he was present in the moment. He noticed that Constant had lost weight and grown some in the months since coming to the palace. His face was beginning to lose its roundness, leaving behind sharp-boned features that Don knew from experience with Savigny would be devastating, eventually, though Constant looked as though he was growing up squarer than his brother, who was gorgeously dainty in a way that drove Don out of his mind. “You get worse when you don’t follow the routine. It’s worse today, isn’t it?”

Don waited, but Savigny was quiet. The wine had dulled him, or the sedative it contained. Already, he felt both foggier and clearer all at once. More awake, but less able to think.

“Raven must still be getting to me,” Don said, pushing his bowl away as he stood to pace, wine in hand. “I don’t understand  _ how _ . Rain stands guard outside my door and the dogs sleep within, with me. There’s no way she’s getting past them. I thought leaving my rooms would improve me, is that not what was implied?”

Constant gave Don a strange, side-eyed look that Don turned away from, uncomfortable with it. Instead, he attended to Bon Bon, whom he had not loved yet this morning as she deserved, and who seemed quite pleased when he climbed onto the floor with her and quite ruined his fine breeches by affectionately ruffling her. When Earnest was done with his breakfast, he joined them, barrelling in with all the enthusiasm of his youth.

“I wish you’d let me speak to Savigny,” said Constant unhappily, coming to sit beside him as they petted the dogs together. Don was rarely without Constant by his side these days. Constant had grown very good at helping hide the fact that Galla’s king was hearing the voices of the dead.

_ “I’m not dead, fool. Just driven away.” _

“I don’t need Savigny,” replied Don, who was looking for his wine. He’d misplaced it. Had time passed? He didn’t know; he didn’t  _ know _ . “Constant?”

Constant looked at him, wan under his dark colouring and with bags around his eyes that Don was sorry for. He truly was slipping. If only he could explain just how hard it was to be devoured by waking dreams. And this, Constant here acting as Don’s saviour against the reality of his insanity, he’d never wanted this. Savigny, yes. Savigny and Don, together, had stood solid against worse. But never Constant.

But Don’s wants might as well have been wishes, for all the good that they did.

He admitted, regrettably honest, “I don’t think I can leave my rooms today.”

Constant was resigned to this. “I’ll do what I can,” he said. 

The two of them, such a pair, Don thought, and would have laughed, if he’d had the breath or the strength to do so. Look at them pretending to be one whole king, futilely trying to convince the world that Don was capable. It wasn’t sustainable. 

Don lay down beside the dogs, too exhausted to get up and do anything else. Savigny, of course, lay next to him.

_ “You’re going to die hiding,”  _ said the false Savigny, as Don was certain he was false even though he felt so absurdly, truly real.  _ “They can see you here, too. Us mages, we can see anywhere we please.” _

Don closed his eyes.

Today, he was better. Time had passed again. The harvest was failing.

Don sat at a table while nobles bickered around him, unable to attend to any of the quarrelling voices except for Constant’s on his left and Daine’s on his right. A Daine day was a good day, he’d discovered. Savigny was either frightening or comforting, never anything in between. Daine was sensible. His mother, devastating. And the Raven days …

They didn’t bear thinking about. 

Constant had shoved a pile of parchment before him along with a fully inked quill. They’d discovered that, while Don’s attention tended to wander, some part of his mind was still as quick as it had once been. Generally, if he was having a good day, he was able to take enough notes to keep his mind together, and it gave him something to focus upon. They’d also moved Don’s seat back from the main table, where he’d traditionally sat with his nobles, to the higher table behind them. This made Don seem as though he was placing himself above them, which was fitting for a king, if insolent, and none of them commented on it. Truly though, it was to hide the bad days when Don’s notes became nothing but manic scribbles and paranoid scratchings. 

Constant sat with Don at the high table, which annoyed the nobles but there was little to be done about that. Bon Bon slept at their feet. Earnest was too young for these meetings; he played with the fish ferrets.

“Ridiculous,” declared Lady Elspeth de Darragon, who wasn’t supposed to be here beside her husband, as he held the peerage, yet here she was. Don didn’t care. Many others did. “You do understand why the southern fiefs are losing the harvests, don’t you? Darragon  _ cannot  _ supply enough food to feed all of Galla without mages to drive away pestilence. As long as you maintain restrictions upon magic, we will starve.”

“The mages bring the pestilence,” snapped the lord of one of the northern fiefs, one which escaped Don’s mind right now. He idly shaped a circle on his parchment until Constant noticed and wrote upon his scroll: Lord d’Ayvelles. Don remembered with a rush that his was the fief that bordered Hartholm. “You speak so easy, hidden here in your city holdings, but there isn’t a day that Fiefs Ayvelles and Guise aren’t harried by mage-sent monsters and plagues! We’ve a cursed sickness in our animals now. They die horribly, bleeding from every orifice. Tell  _ me  _ that isn’t mage wickedness, to punish us for daring to restrict their power.”

“We are harried by Immortal creatures too,” said another woman. Don eyed her. She was tall and broad, similar in looks to Rain, who stood to attention behind Don’s chair. Rain guarded him personally these days. Don would trust no one else. “I doubt mages sent them, though. We had a man, a healer, living near Montmorency Keep. Vicious half-spider half-human creatures killed him and his family at the turn of the season.”

“Wolves,” said d’Ayvelles with a dismissive grimace. “They’ll always turn on their own. Perhaps his own summoning went awry.”

_ “Wolves don’t murder,”  _ said Daine quietly from Don’s right. He knew better than to look at her.  _ “They bite when they’re scared though. Look how scared they all are, Don.” _

Don could see. Though the expressions that filled the room ranged from uneasy to rage, he knew that under all of them fear lurked. He knew it from his own expression, every morning he could bear to look in mirrored glass. Before he’d had them all smashed in his quarters, at least. Mages could scry glass. Was there glass in here?

He looked around, stiffening when he saw the polished plate of a mounted shield decorating the wall. Mages could scry  _ anything  _ with a reflection. Metal, glass, jewels. Liquids. There were mugs of liquid in here. Plate armour. The breastplate Rain wore. All were potential eyes. All were –

Constant kicked him below the table, a movement fortunately hidden from the nobles by the cloth that covered it right to the floor. Don looked at him with reproach, but Constant was busy taking his notes and marking a map he’d spread out before himself.

_ “Don’t act like you need kicking and you won’t get kicked _ ,” said Daine, without sympathy.  _ “Attend to what’s being said, not me. You know I’m not real –  _ **_attend_ ** .”

“There are no mage-sent plagues,” Lady Elspeth was declaring, standing up as her rage sent her to her feet. Her husband was watching Don with his usually sedate expression alert. “You fools, we  _ rely  _ on mage-workings! They’re beginning to fail without upkeep. Those that strengthen our medicines and ease childbirth and common ailments. Illnesses are spreading because there are no healers to stall them. People die without healers. Fields falter. That’s what you’re seeing!”

“So you agree the mages are responsible,” declared another. Don couldn’t remember her name either. He drew a quick sketch of her, angled and clumsy, to remind himself after to ask Constant. 

Lady Elspeth made an undignified sound.

“The Tortallans along the border harry Immortals across and set them upon our people,” said the Regent of Thurn, Sir Antony. He ruled Fief Thurn in his lord’s stead. His lord was five years old, orphaned by Raven’s mur –

_ “You don’t know that,”  _ Daine reminded him.

Orphaned by murderers, unknown.

“They still maintain the border?” Don asked, shocking all of them into silence as they stared up at him. He rarely spoke. It was a good sign, usually, when he shook his voice into working. It indicated that he was surfacing, even if briefly. That would be nice. He hadn’t felt remotely like he could breathe since Beltane. “The Tortallans must fear us, to keep a hard force hungry in the mountains.”

“Would if they were keeping them hungry,” said Sir Antony grimly. “Though it seems worse in some stretches of the border more so than others, bored and hungry soldiers are doing as bored and hungry soldiers do. Our people tire of having their cattle stolen and their women threatened by Tortallan mutts, even if we generously allow that they do not drive Immortals to us on purpose.”

“And yet, you still maintain that we cannot strike back, Majesty,” said the woman Don had sketched. Nobles passed so quickly through his chambers these days, it was impossible to remember which distant cousins had taken over violently vacated titles. “Despite the Tortallan rapists and vandals threatening our lands. Ultimately, what do you expect will come of ignoring their rudeness? They  _ do  _ have an endgame, and we have no active standing army. When they invade, as they obviously plan to, will we bow to their Mage King and his little witchling brats?”

Adel de Darragon spoke for the first time, his voice chiding: “We understand this is your first time speaking for your lands, Lady de Périgord, but some decorum is appropriate even when incensed.”

Don gazed at the map. A fat silence sunk into the chamber. All eyes were locked upon him.

_ “They need you,”  _ whispered Daine.  _ “Tell them we can’t afford a war with Tortall _ .”

“We can’t afford a war with Tortall,” Don parroted, noting on Constant’s map that Fief Périgord, along with Thurn, edged the Tortallan border. “They are bigger and richer than us. They have knights.”

“We have knights,” spluttered someone outside of Don’s view.

“We have courtiers,” said Lady Elspeth, tone disgusted. “If the Tortallans wish to dance or basketweave, then we shall certainly show them our finest backsides. If they wish to spar, however, we’re going to end up with King Jonathan’s steel-edged boot up our gilded re –”

“Elspeth,” hissed Adel de Darragon at the same time Constant groaned, “Ellie!”

The figment of Daine to Don’s right was giggling. Don barely hid his smile. It felt odd to smile. He liked that Daine let him smile.

“Decorum, huh?” murmured Lady de Périgord.

Lady Elspeth glanced at her. “Who were your parents again?” she asked, haughty. “I’m afraid my education, as limited as it was, severed somewhat abruptly on the outer branches of our noble trees. There’s just ever so much leaf litter out there.”

Lady de Périgord went white with rage, though she fell silent. 

Don choked back another, very inappropriate, giggle. Savigny would have loved this. The  _ real  _ Savigny, not the real-but-not imaginings of Don’s sickening mind. Sav loved verbally sparring with the nobility. The giggle was a good sign though. It was better than being flat, even if it was inappropriate. Don brightened at the potential to wake.

_ “That’s my boy,”  _ said Daine.  _ “But you’re not out of the woods yet. You can’t let Tortall harry us, not if we’re already hungry and Scanra is pecking, as usual. Come on, Don. You’re stronger than this. Show them you’re strong.” _

Daine had no mind for politics, Don knew. That she was slipping into such a voice of political reason meant that his thoughts were returning. She was clarifying what he already knew.

He didn’t need her

_ Hush _ , he thought, sitting upright in his chair and setting the quill down as he determined to attend. Across the room, he saw Adel de Darragon give him another long, steady stare. Rain straightened, something hopeful flickering across her face. Constant’s shoulders were tight, but in his eyes, too, devastating hope. 

“Your reports of Tortallan infiltrations seem clustered along the borders of your fief, Lady de Périgord,” he pointed out. She looked outraged. “This is an observation, not an attack. Have you changed anything about the men you have posted there since taking over from your nephew, may the Black God hold him?”

There was a wave of soft movement around the table as fingers were touched to lips solemnly, to show respect for the late Lord de Périgord, who had been twenty-two years old when sent to the Black God.

By murderers, unknown, Don told himself firmly. 

“None, my liege,” the lady replied.

“Then perhaps it’s on the Tortallan side where the fault lays,” Don pondered. “Their Fief Sinthya lines your lands, Sir Antony. That’s a major keep. If the Tortallans have a commander, they’ll be stationed there, which may be why their soldiers are much better behaved than those further afield. It is perhaps time for diplomacy between them and us if they’re going to be keeping us such close company.”

“You’d treat with Tortallans?” asked Lady Elspeth, sharp in her surprise. “Your mother would spin in her grave to hear of such goings-on.”

Though, Don noted, she didn’t look displeased. Just thoughtful.

He risked a glance to his right, to the empty seat that was there. It was the empty space that gave him the courage to continue. He was strong.

He hadn’t given in yet; he wouldn’t give in now. 

“I am not my mother,” he reminded them. 

It was a good day. In his mind, Donatien was alone.

He ventured to the menagerie, to check on his friends down there. It would be severely disappointing if, during his months of mind illness, standards had slipped. The keepers, who knew his whims, kneeled to greet him and then left him alone to explore as he pleased. They’d return if he required them and not a minute before. 

It was four months past Beltane.

As Don was scattering grain for his collection of fancy hens, resplendent with their ungainly mops of feathers and floofy wings, he heard someone approaching along the multi-gated corridors of the menagerie. As someone who loved Daine, Don and she had long ago – before his parents had died, even – taken control of the menagerie. This was their space, and the animals within were as comfortable as they could make them. That had been before Daine’s magic had driven her away from animals, and when Don had had more time to spend on his loves. Still, only a few wild-caught beasts too old or weary to be released remained in the altered pens. Where once there had been lions, now several retired donkeys lived. The monkey enclosure was home to Don’s silly chickens. There was a sleepy tiger dozing his old age away three rooms over, but he and the small herd of Northern deer with their great crowns of antlers were the only beasts that remained who were truly wild. The otters had been moved from Don’s quarters and down here to their summer homes. And, of course, Don’s cats had their own section of the menagerie to themselves as well, carefully sealed away from the chickens they loved to torment. 

Don looked up as Adel de Darragon and Constant approached, Earnest’s excited barks giving them away. The chickens scattered as a mountain of white fur launched at Don over the low wall of their pen, Earnest dancing about with his fringed tail waving and his face in an expressive canine smile. Don brushed chicken muck from his pants as he switched his attentions to Earnest, scolding him first for frightening the hens before leading him back to the wall. 

“Majesty,” said Adel, kneeling. Constant bowed quickly. “Forgive us for the intrusion. I meant to speak to you some time ago but matters got the best of me. You’re looking well.”

Don smiled tiredly. He knew Adel wasn’t lying. Don was looking better. In the weeks since the meeting where he’d reclaimed his mind, he’d found a restless kind of sleeping schedule as well as his long-forgotten appetite. Magisri Ossika said his weight was returning, thanks to her herbs. Constant just kept at him to maintain his routine. “Thank you,” he said, meaning it. “Is there something you needed of me? Constant, has there been word from the border?”

“None,” said Constant, climbing the wall and bidding Earnest to lay flat upon the ground so he could be introduced properly to Don’s ladies, who clucked anxiously at their big, white intruder. “Though a bird from the south just arrived. Did you know there’s an emissary from Maren travelling to us?”

Don winced. He hadn’t known; he wasn’t surprised. 

“Pox,” he muttered, earning a startled stare from Adel. “That’s it then. I’ll be engaged before the fall is out.  _ Maren _ . Ah, impossible.”

“You’re taking a Maren bride?” asked Adel, going still. “Surely, you’re not … I mean, your Majesty, they’ll surely look to open us to slavery if you do so?”

“You’re out of line, Darragon,” Don warned softly, but without spite. 

The man was right. Don didn’t like it either, but Cole’s advice to him had been to avoid causing Maren offence. Maren was their only potential ally against a winter of starvation, with Tortall flirting their military against Galla’s borders and Scanra, well. Scanra. Though there were plenty that pressed him to make a Gallan match, there was little political incentive to do so.

“My apologies,” said Adel carefully. “Then, if I may confirm, you’ve agreed to a match? That would explain much that has puzzled me.”

That caught Don’s attention. He straightened, not needing to speak to tell the man that he should continue with that thought.

“There are more Marens in Cría than usual, was all I was thinking,” explained Adel, Constant speaking with Earnest in a soft voice below them, though Don could tell he was listening. Constant was always listening. “I’m certain you know that mine is not, ah, the most political mind.”

When Don glanced down to Constant, he saw that Constant was smiling. It was an understatement; Don wasn’t even sure when Adel had started coming to meetings of the peers, but it was certainly a new arrangement. 

“But I do have a great interest in the city temples,” Adel continued, testing his bulk on the wall between them before leaning against it with a sigh. “There are more temples of the god, Yahzed, recently. Many of them are run by Marens, or Carthakians. It’s an interesting outcome, seeing as he’s primarily a Scanran deity.”

“I don’t see how this is my concern,” Don said. He had little interest in religion anymore, seeing as the gods had done their best to damn him from the moment he’d first breathed. “The temple guardians govern their own matters.”

“There have been acts of violence against the other temples,” Constant said, bidding Earnest heel as he stood. It wouldn’t last long. Earnest's attention was easily diverted, no matter how well Constant worked to train him, and the chickens were compelling targets. Don could see the puppy’s eyes longingly following the ladies as they pecked at their grain. “Many of them have closed their doors, for one reason or another, or shifted their attention to this new god. The execution yesterday – it was  _ Yahzed’s  _ followers who ran the rites.”

That got Donatien’s attention. “What was done with the body?” he asked, alarmed. It was the temples’ duty to take care of the remains of those the kingdom executed, to ensure that the spirit was appropriately passed on for judgement. History was not at all shy about warning what happened to monarchs who did not give over the bodies of executed criminals; Don’s dominion over his people ended once the Black God demanded them.

“Claimed by the Red Temple,” said de Darragon. “I haven’t been able to discover what they did with it.”

Don shuddered. A northern god, he knew, meant they’d probably buried it. Even northern Galla tended to burials. Daine had buried her family, after all. But it was a repulsive concept to him; burning, not burial, released the spirit to the Black God. Burial trapped it.

“If I had the people, I’d investigate,” he admitted, trusting that Constant would not have brought a man here they couldn’t speak somewhat freely around, as well as his fond memories of Adel from his youth. “But I simply don’t. If I send the palace guards, they’re as likely to loot the temples as they are to politely enquire to the remains.”

“True, perhaps,” admitted Adel with a frown. “Though I must stress, Your Majesty, Galla cannot afford angry gods on top of everything else it faces.”

“What would you have me do, truly? I ask for your advice. The city guards are busy with the food thefts. My men – those under Captain Rainary, who retain her trust, few as they are – are tied up attempting to stem the reports of smuggling in the lowland fiefs. You have a lowland fief, do you not, Lord Adel?”

“I do, though we grow wheat and barley more so than the scents smugglers prefer.”

“Even so,” said Don. “You know how tentatively those fiefs cling to their incomes. The moment we are no longer contenders in the scent trades, that’s when we lose our exports to the Copper or Yamani Isles. I recognise that we must pay respect to our gods, but I simply cannot spare the people right now. We are beset on all sides by forces aiming to weaken us.”

There was a beat of quiet as Adel stared at Don, giving him the same look he’d given him in the meeting room, all those weeks ago. Don met it steadily.

Finally, Adel bowed, as much as he could with his great bulk holding him stiff.

“Majesty,” he murmured, a light in his expression that hadn’t been there before. “It’s truly a relief to hear you speak so clearly. We had wondered if you’d ever come back to us.”

Startled, Don looked to Constant, who was smiling. Lord Adel took his leave of them before ambling out, leaving the two of them alone.

“You really are better,” said Constant as soon as Adel was gone. “I think Numair was right about the fearwood –”

Don shuddered, reminded of the tormented dreams he’d barely outrun, those which he was certain still lingered inside him, waiting for a moment of weakness.

“– which means he was probably right about the opals too, you know. Raven didn’t have anything to do with putting those opals in.”

“I know, Connie,” said Don, who did. It was a tiring realisation, to consider just how closely treason may linger to his being. “What would you have me do? Cole swears they’re to assist with  _ resisting  _ illnesses of the mind. If I insult him by demanding otherwise, I lose my greatest ally and only advisor.”

He knew what Constant was going to say before he said it.

“Savigny,” began the boy. Don glared at him though, so he changed direction. A true politician’s mind. “Fine, Numair then. Maybe he  _ is  _ a foreigner and a mage, but I trust him, and so does Daine.” Constant thought for a moment before adding, “He might know best how to deal with the Tortallans on the border, too. Don, think about it, please. He’s not what you think. He’s  _ kind _ . He’s only ever been kind. And he saved my life.”

It was the last thing that softened Don towards the thought of the Tortallan mage. Constant thought everyone was kind, and Daine didn’t deal with the kinds of underhanded machinations that infested the royal court. Don knew enough about his own mind to know much of his dislike of the Tortallan was jealousy that Savigny was finding happiness with him, especially as the clouding of paranoia had lessened and he’d broken free of the cold hand of hate clenched around his heart. Though he still shuddered to think of surrounding himself with unleashed mages, and the memory of the power the Tortallan had shown made him break out in a cold sweat, the part of his mind that dispassionately examined the rest wondered that, maybe, if the delusions hadn’t been his in the end …

Maybe the fear wasn’t either.

Don didn’t like being manipulated; manipulated, he was beginning to realise, was all he was.

But the Tortallan, at great cost to himself, had saved Constant’s life.

“Perhaps,” he admitted, turning back to his birds. “Constant, think of all you’ve seen since coming here. I need your advice.”

Constant sounded wary as he answered, “I don’t know as much as I need to. I don’t think I’m …”

“You’re  _ exactly  _ whose opinion I need.” Don pushed away a troubling reminder that he needed to secure Constant’s betrothal to Eloise de Silvain, if Maren was ready to begin treating with Galla. There was no way they would return to slavery. Don would burn his throne himself, if needed. “Tell me, what move would you have me make now? More accurately, what would you do if  _ you  _ were me?”

Constant was quiet. He was used to questions of the like now. Don had been battering him with them since the moment he’d arrived at the palace. He no longer protested them.

“I’d treat with the Tortallans for food,” Constant said eventually, Don turning to look at him. “That’s where we’re in the most trouble. It will arguably stop their border attacks too if their military is given incentive to keep their men under control. That will please the border fiefs, somewhat. Probably. And I wouldn’t marry into Maren. Gallans are not slaves.”

Don shivered at the bold declaration said with so much confidence. 

“Besides,” Constant added, “if you’re marrying to keep the peace, it’s not  _ really  _ the nobles you’re looking to please. There’s a lot less of us than there are the commoners, and they’re not going to like seeing Gallans collared. It’s the nobles who’d be pleased by the wealth of slave-owning. The people will just be hungrier, once they’ve been replaced by those the nobles don’t need to pay. So then they’ll have two reasons to revolt.”

“Bread and freedom,” said Don. “If I deny the Marens, I’ll have at least six fiefs at my throat.”

“Hartholm won’t, and Hartholm is your only fief with a military force. Solange holds Alaire, so you tell me how she feels on slaving. Silvain and Darragon have always been loyalists. You’ll probably keep Thurn, since Tortall will retaliate to any hint of slaving and Thurn will take the brunt of it.”

“And I’ll lose all the southern fiefs, where the wealth collects,” Don reminded him. Constant went quiet, lapsing into a thoughtful silence. Don’s head was beginning to ache and he felt weak and twitchy. He needed to sleep before he lapsed back. 

“I think you might lose them anyway,” Constant said, lowering his voice though Don knew no one would dare eavesdrop upon them here. “When you undo the mage restrictions.”

His stare was ferocious; he looked so much like his brother that Don could weep at the reminder of his grief. All that empty space to the left of him where his Gift should stand, if Don were a whole man as he’d once been. And when Don was like this, his mind clear and alone in his head, he  _ could  _ see a way forward to pulling back the inexorable creep of the laws holding the mages down. He wished he’d been so clear when Savigny had still been here to keep him sensible. But he hadn’t been, and now Savigny was gone, and Don knew that the path he walked forward from here he’d walk alone.

This was the price of Constant’s help, Don knew. He stood beside Don and he looked at him with such pride, but he too would leave if Don didn’t, finally, belatedly, force himself to examine the shape of the world Don had built for those Gallans born Gifted.

“Don,” said Constant, still staring. Waiting to see if Don would falter and let him down, just as so many people in Constant’s past had.

Don thought of Raven. He very specifically didn’t think of cursed opals, and frightful wood, and eyes in every polished surface. Today was a good day. He could attend.

He said, “We’ll see.”

First came an emissary to request the attendance of one of Maren’s princes who had daughters to pawn off. Don deferred where he could, though he knew it wouldn’t last. While they circled each other, the responses from the Tortallans arrived. Don was intrigued that it wasn’t simply a border dispute they wished to discuss. They were sending a full envoy, complete with a minor lordling accompanied by the dean of their magical university, Harailt of Aili, and at least one knight. It was a peace delegation, he was certain – it had the shape of one, albeit hastily created – which he hadn’t been expecting, considering their aggressive border actions. But they were still a week away from arriving in the capital, and the Marens were already here.

It was a relief to be freed from the endless talks and fruitless avoiding the question of marriage for a night to flaunt Galla at its best and most splendid. Don kept to himself at the high table looking out over the ball, where Gallans as resplendent as Copper Isle birds danced in their velvets and silks. As was the tradition for a ball thrown to impress foreign dignitaries, everyone was masked, as was Don, bedecked with sequins and glitter and feathers and jewels to draw attention. It was a glorious sight. Savigny had always loved these balls. 

Don slouched into his seat, nursing a cup of wine that never emptied, so careful of him were his servers. Though he kept his gaze on the knot of Marens – visible from their much calmer outfits than the Gallans, though they were masked as well – mingling in the crowd, his thoughts were, as usual, on Savigny. He was tipsy, to be certain, and morose behind his mask, but most of all he felt a bone-deep ache for the halcyon him of his memories, who’d dressed in finery and loved the thrill of flirting with a masked Savigny. It had been a game for them, to see just how excellently they could obscure Savigny’s identity from the nobles who watched Don to see whom he bestowed the most attention on. They’d been very good at it. So often had they left the nobility aflutter, wondering just who the lad in the ocean green had been, the one the prince had danced all night with. Or, when Savigny had gotten older and sharpened his daring, the lass with the copper gown who’d stood a head higher than Don and swept him about the room as though they’d only been born to dance for each other. Don closed his hands around the cup and hurt all the way through for everything he’d broken. 

Fortunately, the prince had not deigned to bring the daughters he wished to match to Don, so they were not required to flirt with him to draw his attention. Nor did the prince think much of Don. They ignored him, as no doubt they thought him a sure catch. A starving kingdom could hardly have the luxury of choice. Constant wasn’t here, having returned to his estate for the night to visit Daine and Savigny, and his Tortallan teacher. It meant Don was alone with only Bon Bon for company, who sat by his side and watched the dancers too.

He was alone.

A plate was placed in front of him, Don jerking upright to look at the masked woman who slid into the vacant seat to his left. Bon Bon paid her little attention. Upon the plate, delicate baked goods sat in all their iced splendour, so perfectly shaped that Don knew instantly who had created them. This suspicion settled wholly when the woman leaned closer to speak to him and he saw the white hair coiled back into an array that assisted to hold her mask in place, and as he smelled her unique scent. It didn’t help his nostalgia to recognise her, so long had it been since they’d played together. All of them, they’d been children once.

“You’re bold,” he said to her, giving no indication in his tone as to whether she was welcome or not. He doubted she liked him much anymore. He didn’t deserve to be liked. “Dressing as nobility and approaching the king without requesting attendance. Imagine if you weren’t wearing a mask.”

Alianora Gaétansra smiled at him, her mouth visible under the curved shape of her half-mask. “I’m not intimidated by a boy who used to steal Maman’s tarts while Savigny flirted with the staff to distract them, even if that boy calls himself a king now. You’re still the pesky brat whose ears I boxed more than once.”

Don couldn’t help it; he laughed unconvincingly at the memory.

“You never did respect my status,” he said. “And now you come to keep me company. Did I cut such a pathetic sight up here, all on my own?”

“I couldn’t care less how lonely you feel,” was her response, startling him. Since Savigny, no one had truly etched their tongue on him. “I’ve come to play politics, prince.”

She said ‘prince’ how Savigny said ‘prince’. The two of them, they turned it into a promise that cut both ways, sharpened by every expectation they had of the other’s role in their relationship. It made Don’s heart feel odd.

“A baker’s daughter, what gives you the right?” he warned her, voice low. A server stepped forward to fill his mug once more; he waved them away, knowing he’d lose his tongue if he took much more. He also didn’t want them listening.

“Your inaction destroys us,” she said, voice even lower. He tensed. What would he do if she spoke treason, right here? She was his captain’s sister, and a childhood companion. Was he so devoured by his kingship that he’d have her punished for it? “I’m not gilded and pretty in the cage of your court. I take bread to the people who cannot afford it. I feed your fussy nobility and the greedy merchants and the starving poor. I see your frightened mages and your enraged priests. My sister guards you, but I  _ loathe _ you, Donatien, and if I were a stupider woman I’d strike you across your ears like I never dared strike the boy you were.”

He stared at her, slack-jawed with shock.

“You will be the death of us, and we are too splendid to die,” she said with a toss of her head. Hers was a tall, solid build. She was muscled from the work of a baker and as tall as Rainary, if not as broadened by bulk. It was imposing, to sit so close to her simmering rage. It was also familiar. “The nobles, they chitter about you marrying a Maren princess. Do you know their slavers already haunt the lower city? We’ve girls taken just this week, and the city guard who do nothing because they were the children of prostitutes. They think you’re weak. A nothing ruler who’ll bow to their coin and let your people be driven into chains. The people think this too. They have no faith in your feckless leadership. You are finished as a king, _prince_. The people reject you. The least you owe them on your way out is the promise of a future.”

Don said nothing. She said little that he didn’t already know. How could he punish her for seeing so clearly?

“What future can I give them?” he said tiredly, thinking of his own plots. Constant, married to Eloise de Silvain, heir to the throne … an ill-suited queen, perhaps, but with Constant at her side and Don out of their way …?

“An heir,” she said bluntly. Don almost sneered a laugh. Did she not see that that was what they all wanted of him? Even as, with all his being, he knew he’d rather devour his own heart than lay with a woman purely to bring a child into the world to suffer as he had. 

She wasn’t done being frightful.

“Savigny always said you were different,” she whispered, leaning so close he could smell the bakery on her clothes, fine as they were. She’d always smelled of cinnamon and sugar, even when she’d chased him down as children. “He said you’d break any yoke they tried to put on you, the two of you together. You were going to change Galla. And you didn’t. You betrayed us. You betrayed _him_. Here’s my proposal, if that boy with the desire to break Galla to make it better still exists. Let’s break it. Send the Marens home and marry a Gallan.”

“This is ridiculous,” he snapped. “Perhaps we should return to traditional practices and I should marry my sister, would that please you? How pure our line would be then, and how certain the return of the mad kings of old.”

“Your sister is already married,” said Alianora dismissively. Don pulled a face, disgusted at her tone, which suggested she’d considered it. Revolted, he turned to gesture a guard over – and she touched his elbow. 

No one had touched him in so long.

He looked at her, startled, the softest brush of her fingers against his arm shocking in their rarity. 

“Marry a Gallan, Donatien,” she said, her eyes locked on his so intense and shocking. “Not a noble cousin who’ll do nothing but turn the bloodline on itself further than your ancestors already have. What has purity given you but a dying throne and a starving country? Your nobles despise you. They want you to yield to their choices so they can usurp you, using your weakness for their gain. I despise you, but I don’t need you to yield. Just to be as weak as you’ve already proven to be. Yield to  _ no one _ but the boy who thought he’d show them all how different he could be. My family is rich but well known. We have low marriages into noble houses. We are an acceptable level of peasantry for nobility to deign to speak to, freely allowed access to the palace to cater to their desires for fine treats –”

Don had almost choked on his tongue at the audacity, the  _ insanity _ , and barely managed a garbled, “Not to  _ marry _ ,” through the wine he was gulping down, mask askew. 

“We are  _ acceptably  _ common,” she stressed again. She was insane. He was talking to a madwoman. “The people will see me as one of them. The nobility … well, you’ll lose most of them already the moment you refuse Maren, and they’re not so powerful anymore. The rest, they’ll admire the lengths you go to stop Cría burning, and it’s not like you scraped me off the streets of the Bog. We are Jewel-born and bred with recognisable names. And our child would be  _ Gallan _ . Can’t you see the way they’ll cling to the unity of Crown and Commons, the way they clung to the Crown and Gift?”

“It’s impossible,” he repeated bluntly.

“So was your oh-so-desired marriage to Savigny,” was her callous reply, which hurt the whole way down as Don sucked in a breath that included it. “Don’t give me that look. I know how determined you were to have your way there.”

“There was precedent for it,” Don muttered, unsure why he was sitting here still instead of having her taken to the infirmary for treatment for the obvious head injury she must have.

“No, there wasn’t. Kings have consorts, not husbands. If you’d made him king beside you, or prince, or raised him at  _ all  _ out of love, your nobles would have rioted, even without the issue of how you planned to make an heir when you and he have two hams and no ovens. But you still would have done it, wouldn’t you? If he’d stayed?”

Curse her, she was right. He would have.

He would have.

Don glowered.

“If you’d have broken it for him,” Alianora said softly, “then break it now for your people, who are without hope. I know a Maren princess will bring food we desperately need, but the price is too high. And if you can’t – if the faces of the children we’d lose are too hard for you to picture – think of Daine. She was alone and vulnerable, a child in the Bog. Under your mother’s reign, she survived. Under yours, she would become a slave. I’ll carry your heir for you, I’ll support your crown. I’ll stand before our people and tell them what a wonderful king you are. I’ll give a child to the throne the people will love and never demand you lay with me more than what’s necessary for that. You can have your lovers, I don’t care. I will hate your touch just as much as you’ll hate mine. But we’ll be together in our misery, and I’m  _ certain  _ we can shape that misery into something that saves our people, even if out of spite. We can tell them it’s a love match. We’ll flutter our eyes and whisper to the gossips of how we caught each other’s gaze across a crowded room. We shape it how we please, to a tale of a common baker’s daughter who softened the heart of a spoiled prince and made him better. We make them  _ love  _ me as their voice, as their hope – and then we give them a child who will be everything you haven’t been. We are  _ Gallan _ , prince, we adore a risqué romance. They will cry our names from the balconies and name babies after us.”

Don said nothing. He could think of utterly nothing to say.

Finally, because there was nothing else on his tongue, he managed a weakened, “I would never be allowed –”

“Are you the king or aren’t you?” she asked, tilting her head and watching him through the mask. “They use your name on the bills they enact to cripple our mages. Their decrees come with your seal. Though, as Rainy tells me, most of those decrees are signed on days when you are barely conscious in your bed. They treat you as though you’re powerless, a mouthpiece … doesn’t it bother you, to be used so? Don’t you want to strike back?”

She stood, giving him a low curtsey and a tight smile.

“The benefit of a reckless love match is that it can be done fast,” she said as she curtseyed. “We could be married by fall and with an heir by midwinter. If Galla is going to fall anyway despite us, well, wouldn’t it be spectacular to go out with a scandal? It will be the most Gallan you’ve ever been.”

And she left, Don reeling in her wake.

“Insanity,” he murmured to his mug, gazing at the liquid with only a flicker of unease at his reflection. “Utter insanity.”

Perhaps it was because he was drunk, though more likely it was because he was and had always been the stupidest king of Galla. Revolting in his self-loathing, Don slipped from the high table with all the skill of a childhood spent attempting, futilely, to escape the future that now smothered him. No one saw him go or, if they did, they didn’t care. Those who would – Daine, Constant, perhaps Sav though maybe not – weren’t there. Rainary was guarding the doors, where he’d placed her sick when he’d become sick of her watchful eye reminding him that he was only a temporary structure of this court. 

It was an easy trick to vanish into the crowds that gathered outside in the gardens, enjoying the summer evening. He’d been doing it his whole life, vanishing. Every year left less of him to hide. No one expected to see the king slouching his way down the path with a plain mask covering his face, taken from a table where they were piled for those who needed them. The spectacular one he’d left on his seat.

The only thing that might give him away, if someone cared to notice, was Bon Bon who trailed at his heels. There were enough fancy spotted hounds around on this night that it was likely she wouldn’t be noticed, but only if no one saw through the dusk to notice her wood-brown spots where the others had black. 

It was simple enough to escape the palace, as it had always been. The guards were drunk and lazy. Rainary kept her best inside, close to the king, and even those weren’t great. Don felt like he might laugh without mirth as he passed them without comment. 

He didn’t know where he was going; just, away. His brain was bubbling with the shock of what Alianora – Nora, he remembered, that’s what they’d called her when they were children – had presented him. It was impossible, of course. A king could not marry a baker’s daughter, no matter how esteemed her family. And he was a subservient king.

Below his mask, he frowned.

He berated himself as he walked with no end location in mind. He felt safe enough in the Jewel, as he wasn’t the only masked reveller tonight. Celebration in the palace tended to leak into the Jewel, and the people loved a balmy summer night. Only moderately less fantastic than the palace dancers, the streets and balconies were alive with diners and revellers, calling to each other across the cobbled streets with their masks firmly in place. Though it was a lovely sight that soothed him, to see how calm the world outside his palace was instead of the disaster he’d been increasingly expecting to find, it didn’t calm his mind, which lashed at him. You’re an arrogant fool, he snarled at himself, a desperate, detestable despot. A failed leader; a ruined king; barely a man at all. He knew he was a mannequin propped up by his creators, who dressed and shaped him as they pleased. An effigy with no human existence. He felt no sexual desire as humans did, except fleetingly and strangely in the past when Savigny had battled his stagnant body to try force a mechanical response from it. Don hated the memories of how Savigny hadn’t minded that they couldn’t bed each other properly; he hated the guilt that had come with Savigny’s protestations that he preferred connection over completion, which Don was unable to provide. It was no wonder Savigny had found himself with the Tortallan mage, who could give him what he desired, what he needed. Who could love him properly. Don knew he loved wrongly, consumed by grief for the relationship of his past that had died along with the two men they’d been then. He was a stunted child, locked into nostalgia and drowning in it. An ill-fitted king, an imposter –

He tripped, stumbling into a wall and catching his arm against the rough stone. It left his forearm bloodied, and he let gravity take him all the way down and didn’t bother flinging his arms out to catch himself. There was no point.

On the ground, where he belonged, he considered the state of being despicable.

And then he realised where he was.

“Oh no,” he muttered, breath hot under the confines of his mask as he sat back up, wobbly and dishevelled. He was on the street three gates up from the entrance to the Hartholm city estate. He couldn’t be here. It was …

He paused.

He thought of Nora. He couldn’t make this decision alone, he thought, following it up with a weary reminder that it wasn’t a decision at all. It was insanity. It should be ignored. He didn’t  _ need  _ advice. But he was drunk. And he was attending to his life. And he was tired of being afraid.

Don got up and limped to the gates, shoulders bowed and ready to beg forgiveness on his knees, if that’s what it took to get Savigny to hold out his hand and stop Don from drowning.

Savigny had no guards. Don scowled at that as he took hold of the frame of the smaller entrance beside the wider, barred gates, jiggling it in the way they’d done as children to loosen the internal lock without knocking for entry. It surely wouldn’t open. Savigny wasn’t that …

It swung open, Don muttering to himself about Savigny’s idiocy. He was of half a mind to pay to have Savigny’s gates replaced himself, if that’s what it took. And a staff of guards. They were vulnerable when anyone could just –

Bon Bon wuffed softly next to him, startling him as he turned to look where she was peering. He’d forgotten she was with him, she was such a silent presence. She hadn’t even nosed at him when he’d fallen, just sat back on her haunches and waited for him to get up. Oil lanterns hung over the streets of the Jewel and lit at twilight gave off enough light for Don to see across to the open gates of the Darragon estate, where a white blur was visible scooting in rapid circles around an unimpressed horse. 

Earnest. Which meant Constant.

Don’s courage faltered. He pulled the small gate closed, letting the broken lock catch once more as he limped towards the gates of Darragon. Unlike Savigny, Lord Adel kept guards, who watched him attentively. He didn’t need to ask permission to pass them, however; Lord Adel and Constant were walking across the courtyard. He stopped, letting them approach. They were talking. They passed the guards, Adel waving them back as they went to follow. Security here, Don noted with a shiver, was lax. But he blamed his paranoia, which he couldn’t let rule him, otherwise, it wouldn’t be long before the hallucinations and the mind-fog returned too.

Lord Adel was evidently walking Constant back to the estate, their arms filled with books. Constant was chattering without pausing for breath, something which made Don’s heart feel heavy. There was no rapid, happy chattering when Constant was at the palace, only him fighting to maintain Don.

He stepped back, wishing he’d never come here, but Earnest had spotted Bon Bon and hurled himself at them, barking happily as he danced around his taller friend with a puppy’s manic glee. Don watched him dance, then looked up right into Constant and Lord Adel’s horrified expressions. They knew him, even if no-one else did. Only he would be here with Constant’s lady hound by his side.

“Don!” hissed Constant, almost losing his armfuls of books as he scuttled over, Adel follower slower but with just as much haste. “What are you doing here? Where are your guards?”

Adel nodded his head stiffly, barely moving his lips behind his beard as he murmured, “Begging your pardon, sir, but I don’t think I should kneel. Perhaps we should move indoors?”

Don fumbled for his words, gruesome and morose.

“I was looking for Savigny,” he said, aware of how pathetic he sounded. “But then I … couldn’t.”

“Oh,  _ Don _ ,” said Constant. The frustration on his tongue was evident. “Come on. Come inside. You’re a mess. Are you drunk?”

Don shrugged sloppily, knowing he was swaying. He regretted drinking so much wine. He looked past Constant, to Adel, wishing the older man would step in and say something kindly, tell him it wasn’t his fault and that he, Adel, would handle it, that Don could relax for just one minute and let someone else fix it, that –

Earnest was barking, trying to tempt Bon Bon to tussle –

People were laughing, talking, living – 

Constant was still scolding in the quietest, angriest voice he possessed –

Adel sighed, opening his mouth to speak –

And Don was looking right at him. He was looking right at him.

The arrow struck Adel with devastating force into the meat of his shoulder, sending him forward with a grunt. It was a vicious shot, right through the heavy veins of the joint, and sprayed the back of Constant’s head with blood. Adel snapped a hand to it with a bellow of pain. Don stepped back with surprise. Constant, who had his back to Adel, touched a hand to his head and laughed as though he thought he’d been splashed with water, only stopping when his hands came away red. So much else was happening. Guards were shouting. Bon Bon was barking now, real screaming barks of fear as she lunged at Constant and dragged him down. And Don realised, belatedly, as Adel ripped the arrow from his body with a force that was unwise and also wholly unexpected, that not all the liquid that had sprayed them was blood.

Another arrow struck the cobbles, aimed at – Don realised, his mind going white with rage – Constant, though Bon Bon had pulled him down out of the way. Someone was firing at Constant.

Something attached to the arrow, just as the one on Adel had, burst, spraying a bitter, gelatinous liquid on them with enough force to imply it was somehow magicked. No normal liquid moved like that. It was clear. Like a jelly. They looked at it, slow with shock.

Don glanced up, following the line of the arrow and meeting the eyes of the archer upon a rooftop nearby. The archer raised their hand. Mage fire glittered.

The street exploded into flames.

Don surfaced from where he’d been thrown, realising his arms were wrapped around Earnest, who was howling. Constant was buckled on the ground nearby, his clothes smouldering in places and with Bon Bon roaring over him. She didn’t look hurt, just angry. Constant, however, as Don’s ears began to work again, was screaming. Don looked to see why. And then he was screaming too, staggering up and flinging himself towards the inferno that was Lord Adel de Darragon, who’d been coated in the jelly when it had combusted. Adel, horrifically, was still alive; Don felt the heat, smelled meat cooking, heard the soggy gurgles, and he realised he could do nothing; he could do nothing but stagger back, retching onto the street with his skin burning where he’d been splashed. 

Over it all – the screaming, the roar of flames, the barking, guards shouting – Don heard the  _ thwack  _ of an arrow striking stone, his head snapping around just in time to see Constant roll away from the projectile that had struck the cobbles by his head. If it weren’t for the chaos of guards trying to fling water over the fire, over Adel, the smoke and the panic, it would have struck him. 

The white returned, the rage.

Don launched up and ran for the building, charging for the archer who vanished from the rooftop. But Don and Savigny had  _ owned  _ this neighbourhood as children. They knew its secrets; they’d created its pathways. Don took two shortcuts between buildings, leaping a small wall and another fence, breaking out where he knew the archer would have to climb down. He was only seconds behind his quarry, who saw him and hesitated, fire on his fingers. Unsure whether he’d fight or flee.

Don snarled. Not  _ Constant _ .

Never Constant.

Don was unarmed. He had sobered from shock, but there was still alcohol slowing him. He had only two things on his side: the absolute wrath he possessed for someone who  _ dared  _ strike at his little brother, and the white-hot terror of being flung so vividly back into the madness of the day his mother had died. With no part of him was he thinking of anything but stopping the mage who’d killed her before he could kill Savigny too, or anyone else Don loved.

They hit the ground, Don going for the man’s hands before he could grab for his knife. He wasn’t quick enough. A blade stabbed at him but, if it made contact, Don didn’t feel it. He was cold now, all the way through, seeing only his mother’s body and Constant with an arrow through his skull, and Adel’s burning face, as he lashed out with his elbow and struck the knife away, going for the man’s eyes with his thumbs. He scrabbled and gouged, neither of them speaking as they fought with the single-minded determination of animals locked together, both knowing the first one to fall would die. Don tasted blood, unsure if it was his or if he’d bitten his quarry. He felt the dull impact of the knife. He felt his hands around the man’s throat, but he was a weak, sick man now and, for some reason, he was losing strength. There wasn’t enough left of him to close his grip and end this. A knee drove his air out of his chest; they rolled; Don felt dirt and blood on his face; he choked on it; the knife fell –

Daine came from nowhere. Of course, it was her, Don thought, as the man’s weight was wrenched from him by the force of the impact. She would have smelled his blood because, Mithros be, there was so much blood. He rolled, dizzy, undone, choking on vomit and blinded by whatever muck was in his eyes, to see her launch her booted foot with  _ savage  _ strength into the man’s groin, following it up with a curled finger to the eye that there was no easy coming back from. 

Dazed, Don thought, so she  _ did  _ listen when Savigny taught her to fight. He was glad.

Then he blinked and the man was dead and it wasn’t Daine over Don at all – she was crouched next to him, her hands on his chest and her expression gaunt – but Savigny, who was white-eyed with fear. Don sat up, threw up. There were hands on him and he remembered Adel’s face, Mithros, his  _ face _ , and he was remembering being small and going to Adel for sweets and sneak-glimpses of the beautiful books in his study, and he was remembering how much Pech loved his uncle, and then he was crying and choking and crumpling inwards until he was caught, he was  _ caught _ , against Savigny’s firm chest and his powerfully beating heart; there was no coming back from this, no gathering his sensibilities, no hiding his grief and horror; there was only Savigny, and there was only Donatien, and there was only letting the man who’d loved him so much hold him and rock him and refuse to let him go as he shattered under the terror of everything he’d just seen, unravelling stunningly until he was just a man who’d seen something terrible and who needed comforting, just like any other.

Donatien had been dreaming since the Lord of Darragon Fief had died, it felt. He’d plunged back into the fog. He knew he was doing it too, knowing from the moment he’d let Savigny half-carry him from the back alleys of the Jewel and looked up to see the blessedly silent remains of one of his lords, who hadn’t deserved to die like that, in their desolate place upon the stone. It had been so much easier than facing it.

Savigny hadn’t let him go. Not as they’d walked across the abandoned street, everyone having fled as the mage fires smouldered, the blood and the stone and the ash. Not as they’d passed the Tortallan mage, who was green under his brown colouring as he openly used magic to quell the fires. Don barely even noticed him, though his heart gave such a gallop at the sight of the Gift that he’d almost passed out clear into Savigny’s arms. Not when they’d entered the Darragon estate and found Constant clutched into Lady Elspeth’s arms as she wailed – and  _ gods _ , as soon as Don heard that wail, the inconceivable  _ grief,  _ it was no wonder he went away for a while in his head.

When he came back, he wasn’t alone and he knew he wouldn’t be for some time.

_ “I told you _ ,” said Raven, standing beside Constant with her inhuman gaze locked on where Don trembled, still with Savigny’s arms around him. The Tortallan had walked in and now crouched by Savigny’s knees, one hand on his thigh and his mouth moving as he talked to them. Don wasn’t attending. He was looking at Raven, who stared back.  _ “I can get any of them, anywhere I please. There’s no escaping me, you who’ll be the Briefest King of a Ruined Galla. Are you listening to me? I won’t go away now. There’s no coming back from this.” _

Don closed his eyes. 

He pulled himself out of the fog after that only once, subjecting himself to Raven’s torments and the false-Savigny’s sneers, which were barely even dulled by the slow realisation of Don’s that the  _ real  _ Savigny was there with him, at least part of the time. Time had been lost to him. It had been hours, days? It must be days.

They were giving Lord Adel to the Black God. 

It must be days.

Don swayed, finding himself propped up where he’d been placed with only the vaguest memory of crawling from his bed, where he’d fallen stinking of burned skin and dirty blood. He remembered demanding his clothes, remembered rejecting another mug of medicated wine. He must be clear. Just today, for the funeral, he must attend, even though he knew he stood here surrounded by fleets of his shattered reality. He didn’t know who around him was real and who was a hallucination, though he could guess Savigny to his left was false as was Raven to his right. And his mother, standing over the pyre, Don would gamble that she wasn’t real, though she smirked at him as though she was. 

Constant, crying. Don looked at him and knew he was real, and grieved for his pain which was real too. Don attended to that pain, limping forward – limping? He looked down and saw that his breeches were distorted from a bandaged thigh, and so was the altered arm of his coat – and placing a hand on Constant’s shoulder, letting him turn into the comfort.

He croaked, “I’m here. I’m with you.”

Savigny stepped to the other side of Constant, his fingers settling gently on his other shoulder. Don looked at him, astounded. He was  _ real _ .

“We’ve got you,” said Savigny softly to his brother, his other hand reaching behind Constant’s back to touch at Don’s dangling wrist. Their fingers touched. They clung.

Don stood straight, bolstered by the fingers in his and those who needed to see him strong. Just for today, as they sang Adel de Darragon to his judgement, where Don knew he’d be found deserving of so much more than he’d been given, Don could be himself. He hid his pain, inexpertly. The pyre was lit and Don had to turn away, so sickened he was by the reminder. He saw Elspeth standing tall and alone in her widowed blacks, pale with shock, and he realised that Pech was right behind her and almost bowed in two by his tremendous grief; he saw Elspeth’s dry eyes and the tears on Pech’s sallow face – and he tried to look away, tried not to cry too, tried not to buckle.

Tried to be a king for these people, for Elspeth and the other nobles, who were vivid with fear for their own, for Constant who sobbed and Daine who stood with her head bowed, and for Savigny, whom Don couldn’t cry in front of  _ again _ . But nowhere he turned was safe, always someone to see his tears. Raven to laugh at him and his mother to disapprove. 

_ “Kings don’t cry, Donatien,”  _ he heard his mother say into his ear, jolting into Constant with shock at the proximity of his madness.

Someone stepped beside him, close enough to obscure him in their shadow and tall enough that Don had to look up to meet his gaze. The Tortallan offered him a slip of silk, a borrowed handkerchief with an embroidered Hartholm crest upon the edging. 

Don only hesitated a moment before taking it, attaching his shredded focus on the dark gleam of those soft eyes and the way the man’s hair hung in silken strands around a narrow, kindly face. “Look at me until you can breathe again,” said the Tortallan in a pleasantly hesitant voice, as cautious in his speaking as someone who’d grown up considering the power of every word. His was a nice voice. It was soothing. Don wished he could resent this man his disarming good looks and his gentle voice, but he couldn’t. “There’s no shame in grieving for your dead. Let them see you hurt with them too.”

Don stared at the man, who gazed back without harm or ill-intent in his eyes. Though the voices crowding his brain yattered at him that here was a mage, a foreigner, a potential assassin, he ignored them. 

Constant had said this man was kind.

“Thank you …” he said, conscious of how rusty his voice had grown in all the lost time between Adel’s death and now. Conscious, too, that he’d misplaced this man’s name.

“Numair,” prompted the Tortallan.

Don nodded. He breathed again. He attended, just for today.

And he said, “Thank you, Numair.”


	32. After Adel

The anger that was building post the death of Adel de Darragon made Numair apprehensive. He spent the days following the funeral drifting from Daine, who was devastated, to Savigny, who was brimming with rage, to Constant, who …

Numair couldn’t bear Constant’s pain. It was almost easier to witness Elspeth’s stunning grief because at least the loss of a husband was quantifiable, a sorrow that everyone understood was ruinous. Constant, though. Constant was someone who’d lost so many adults important to him, and here was another gone. He was bearing it so stoically it was breaking Numair’s heart. Throughout the funeral, though the adults had been shattered in their various ways, Constant had stood tall with his eyes locked on the burning monument of the pyre. That gaze hadn’t wavered once; he’d stayed there until it had burned down, long after others had left. The only other who’d stayed as long was Pech, who’d sat himself on the ground beside where Constant stood, the two of them silent in their mourning. 

As the days passed, putting distance between them and the moment of ignition on the stones, Numair found himself apart from the others, unable to grieve as deeply as they did for a man he hadn’t known very well. It left him observant on the outside, looking in. 

Numair’s thoughts turned to Donatien. Any progress they’d seen since removing him from the grasp of the fearwood and the opals had been lost with Adel. He’d nosedived straight into somnolence, rarely rising from his bed. From all accounts, when he did it was with little sense to his mind. Rumours of the king’s dereliction had spread like wildfire through the Jewel and further since, though he hadn’t been seen witnessing the death of Adel, someone in the palace had a wagging tongue about all that had followed when they’d returned him there. It frustrated Numair, who’d seen the signs of Donatien struggling during the funeral, but who had also seen just how hard he’d tried to mask it. It didn’t seem fair that the man had fought so hard to be whole in spirit for Constant and the other nobles, only for someone within the palace to take it upon themselves to tell all that the kingdom was, presently, leaderless.

Numair also didn’t know  _ why  _ the king was slumping back into the fearwood state. The ropes of black through Donatien’s core that was the infestation of fearwood had faded since Numair had first seen it on Beltane, though nowhere near as quickly as Numair’s had. Donatien had also had no exposure to the opals, that Numair or Constant knew of, since then. 

Poison, considered Numair grimly, unable to dismiss the possibility. It was the most alarming outcome. Constant, after all, ate with the king.

Daine entered the study where Numair was lurking, distracting Numair from his thoughts. She brought with her a plate of sticky honey buns, which his stomach grumbled to see. Fortunately, because she was splendid, he knew she was here to share them with him. 

Once she was settled in her accustomed spot by the window, with half the buns stacked neatly in front of Numair, she watched him.

“Savigny is down getting sweaty in the practice yard,” she commented as she picked at her snack. “I’d have thought you’d be down there ogling.”

“I do  _ not  _ ‘ogle’,” said Numair, offended, though he did wonder if the practice yard was visible from the window Daine was sitting by, and if she’d notice if he just happened to idle over there and peer out. “But, alas, no. I’ve banished myself to be lonesome up here, where I can ponder deep thoughts without being distracted.”

He affected a damaged air, just so she knew how great his struggle was.

Her mouth twitched. “By ogling,” she said.

“By  _ chatter _ ,” he corrected. As she laughed at him – rudely – he realised, they’d never truly finished discussing what had occurred in the Bog. Though it didn’t feel the time right now, he knew there was unlikely to be a better one. “Daine? We never did talk about the men from the Bog. Not after everything that happened.”

She was looking at the glass-blown orb he was handling, though he’d obscured the image within with a cloud of his speckled Gift as she’d entered. It was now just a ball of black fog lit with glitters of white, and he saw her glance from that to the one that sat upon Savigny’s desk. Savigny’s, unlike Numair’s, was not obscured. They could see the fine bones of his hare construct suspended within. It had been abandoned in the chaos of the last two weeks.

“I don’t think there’s much need for that,” she said. He could tell her curiosity about the ball was eating her. She would have to remain eaten; this was for his eyes only. “I’ve made my peace.”

“Have you?” queried Numair cautiously.

She said firmly, “Yes. It’s not a good feeling, having people’s lives on my soul, but I can carry it. Some of us are carrying heavier weights than men who tried to kill us for being different.” She gave him a long, steady look. “Some of us are trying to carry all of Carthak.”

He returned her look with a tired smile. “My shoulders are bigger than yours.”

Her response was a frown, rising from her seat and coming over to perch upon his desk as she shoved the plate with her buns in front of him. “Only because you’re so cursed tall,” she said, sounding disproportionately irate considering how inane her statement was. He flicked her hand away as she reached for the globe, earning another frown. He treasured her frowns. It turned out, after all this time, annoying her was truly the way into her heart. “You’re too thin. Eat your buns.”

“They’re  _ your  _ buns. And stop trying to distract me so you can touch my things.”

She looked inclined to scuffle with him for it, which he dared her to do with his eyes. It was a lovely reprieve from the sadness of the past week, and he loved the smile in her eyes even if her mouth was still turned down.

“You’ve gotten skinnier,” she warned, tone disapproving. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed that all you’ve been doing is lurking up here thinking your big silly thoughts and only eating when we put things in front of you. Just because you’re feeling guilty doesn’t mean you’ve got a right to starve yourself.”

“Daine, Carthak was years ago,” he said pleasantly. “I’m sorry for what happened there and I always will be, but I’m not  _ starving  _ myself over it. Stop distracting me from talking about you.”

“I’m not talking about Carthak,” was her response. “There wasn’t anything any of us could have done to stop Adel dying, but I know you’ve sat here thinking you should have. You and your big magics.”

Numair froze. He didn’t have a retort.

She added, “Now, eat your buns.”

He wasn’t ready for her to lean forward, nab a shred of bun from the plate, and pop it into his mouth. He was still processing how clearly she saw him. All he knew was that one moment he was gaping at her, and the next her fingers were at his lips and he was forced to accept the bun or have honey smeared across his mouth. Evidently, as startled as he was by this gesture, she was even more so; she went still, fingers brushing his lip, and then snapped her hand back as though he’d burned her, her cheeks briefly flushed. 

Obediently, he swallowed his shred of bun. 

“Embarrassed by your mothering,” he muttered, wiping his mouth with a napkin before picking up another bun and beginning to eat it, just to please her. “As you should be.”

Daine didn’t answer, looking away to study the globe on Savigny’s desk.

Numair opened his mouth to speak, but she’d turned back and was looking past him. He turned too, looking down to his mirror, which flashed.

“Bother,” he muttered, glancing to Daine – but she was gone. She was craftier than a cat when it came to disappearing. He’d never pin her down now. Frustrated, he turned to the mirror, which reshaped into George. Numair spoke first without giving George time to say anything, his low mood making him impatient: “You’re not going to like what I’ve got for you.”

George didn’t. He listened in silence with his fingers steepled under his chin, mouth grim. And when Numair was done, he had his own unhappy additions.

“They’ve already discussed this eventuality, but I’d be lying if I said they liked it,” George said of the potential Kalasin marriage to Donatien. “She’s too young and Galla’s too unstable.”

Numair exhaled with relief.

“But,” added George. Numair inhaled again. “You’ve a delegation already on their way, from Tirragen. I know, don’t look at me like that – we didn’t have time to move someone from Corus. Tirragen was the best we had, and I hear the house there is fidgeting to get back in His Majesty’s good grades.”

Numair shrugged. Though he knew of Jon’s animosity against Fief Tirragen, the finer details eluded him. He only hoped they were qualified.

“Kally is safe though?” he asked hopefully. At that moment, he knew he was speaking as George’s friend, not as an Owl. George knew it too.

He loved Kally too.

But he wasn’t a liar, not even to spare Numair’s heart.

“I don’t know,” said George, splaying his hands to show his unease. “I just don’t know. I don’t think Jon will decide anything until she’s at least passed eleven though. Thayet would murder him if he moved before that, and then what a sorry state we’d be in.”

“Galla’s hardly a good match,” said Numair, feeling sour. He wasn’t at all kind for his current location, not today. Not with the street outside still paved in ash.

George hummed, expression distant. “They’ve a lot of riches up there,” he said, Numair feeling even meaner at the reminder. “You don’t get heartwood except in Galla, and they’ve the market cornered on fruitrose too. You could buy a small town for a pound of pure fruitrose. It’s just never been worth trying to coax it out of them. Tortall’s only had failed marriages between them and Galla, and there’s a fair bit of spite built up on the issue, so I’m not certain their people would accept a Tortallan queen. That aside, I’ve had unhappy whispers from my other little mountain birdies. Vin Bryson.”

“I don’t know who that is,” said Numair.

“Not by that name, no, but I do. It’s the name your friend, Nonsense, went by when she whistled for me.” George’s face had gone cold. There was no humour remaining within the lines of it. “It’s not your concern. I need you to stay away from her. She’s nasty, she’s skilled, and this explains why we’ve had so many odd magics coming out from Galla. She always did have a strange way with illusions.”

“You don’t want them arrested?” asked Numair.

George’s expression didn’t change. 

“Ah,” was Numair’s soft response, realising. He wondered which of the spies he’d met was the knife, and he hoped they were good. He had a suspicion that Nonny would be better.

“I’m curious about this Raven character though.” George looked supremely thoughtful. “She’s invested a lot of time into learning about you and using that information to unsettle you, but then she turns and attempts to turn you to her side? If she’s trying to manipulate you, it feels clumsy. Does she seem clumsy?”

Numair thought about that. George seemed disinclined to rush him, so he took his time to make sure he’d truly thought it through. 

“I don’t think she’s clumsy,” he said slowly. “She seemed … unsettled. I think I unsettled  _ her _ , or Daine did. She came at me with a plan to unseat me with the information about Ozorne she’d gathered, but then something threw her off. It was when Daine began confronting her that she really seemed to lose her focus. And once Daine was gone, she seemed better able to maintain the purpose of her excursion, though she continued to act odd.”

“So it likely has to do with your student,” said George, expression guarded. “She’s the adopted sister of your Marquis Hartholm, isn’t she? Someone who also seems to be of great interest to this Raven. Are you certain you can trust both the Marquis and the woman, this Daine?”

Numair thought of Savigny and Daine. It wasn’t a hard question.

“I think they have secrets,” he said. “But I do too. I trust them, George. I’d trust them with my life.”

George nodded, no glint in his eyes as he spoke now. “Well, make sure you don’t have to. If my darling found I’d gotten you killed by a Gallan, of all people, she’d have me strung from the keep.”

Numair laughed; he couldn’t help it, it was just such an easy image to picture.

“Where is Alanna, anyway?” he asked. “You never did get around to telling me during our last truncated contact.”

There was a beat of tense silence before George spoke again, not a flicker of emotion on his features giving him away. Numair knew better than to read into it. George wasn’t someone with tells taken at face value.

“Following up a strange lead on something to give us an edge on Carthak,” he said, voice flat. “I’ve been ordered not to speak of it but … Numair, I don’t trust it. It feels too good to be true. I especially don’t like that it’s lured Alanna away right when we’ve got suspicious activity on every border and Immortals hiding under every rock.”

Numair thought back to their last conversation. “A second Dominion Jewel?” he asked.

George went to nod, then turned it into a half-shrug. “I don’t think it’s quite the same, for what I know of it. Alanna can be … aggravating … when she’s decided to exclude me from something. As she tells me, there are some things it takes a knight to discover, not a spy.”

“Ouch,” said Numair, pulling a face. George’s blank expression didn’t falter. “I can’t say I’m in a good place to dive into the subject, but I can do what I can. Is this something you’d prefer I didn’t discuss with Savigny? He obtains many of my texts.”

“I’d go so far as to order you not to speak with the Marquis about it, if I thought that wouldn’t have the opposite effect,” George said. Numair couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. Sometimes it was hard to tell with George. “I don’t think it’s real – or feasible to obtain, even if it is – but if it is, I can’t imagine Jon is interested in it simply to complete the set.”

Numair didn’t need it spelled out further; if this second jewel was, somehow, real, it may be turned against Galla in the future. Against Donatien, and potentially against Savigny.

“I worry about her, Numair,” said George softly, which Numair knew was as close as they were going to get to George admitting he was bending the rules because he feared his wife was walking into a trap set to rid Tortall of its Lioness. Numair couldn’t argue the feeling either. Having seen how insidious the forces on Galla were, he no longer felt as secure in the sanctity of Tortall. 

“She’s fought scarier beasts than a pretty rock,” Numair reminded him. “Even if ultimately at the end of this trouble it’s Carthak, I’d put my money on Alanna over Ozorne.”

“He bested you,” George said.

Numair, after wincing, responded, “Alanna’s stronger than I am.”

George’s only reply was a thin smile

Determined to have his way, Numair went searching for Daine. It wasn’t a hard search. She only had a few places she lingered in the scope of the estate and, since she’d been foisted out of the kitchen by the return of the staff, Numair knew that left the second most-likely as the stables. He found her currying Sugar, sweaty from exertion and with strands of her smoky brown hair escaping the weakened elastic of the tie she’d pulled it back with. Taking a leaf out of her book, he gingerly perched himself up onto the wall of the stall – feeling as though he was wobbling – and watched her from his lofty height.

“I wasn’t done talking to you,” he said mildly as she worked, ignoring the cross stare she gave him. “Don’t be petulant. It’s not becoming.”

“I’ll remember that next time Sav’s not home to please your bedroom and you spend the whole time pouting around the estate like Midwinter has been cancelled,” she retorted, Sugar snorting as though sharing in Daine’s irritation. “I’m not beating myself over killing the men. I’m coming to terms with Adel dying, as awful as it was. I know you and Sav spent the next three days putting magic around this place strong enough to make a lesser mage cry. No one’s getting in.”

Numair was pleased she’d noticed. He never knew just how much attention she paid to what he taught Savigny, who was his sole remaining devoted student of his initial three. If Numair did something Savigny didn’t know or found interesting, Savigny would either demand Numair teach him it or learn it himself; Daine tended to linger on the outskirts, feigning disinterest unless she was spending time with the book of animal anatomy that Thayet had sent and Savigny was using to help him build his hare. 

“What else is there to quibble over? Oh,  _ pox _ .” 

The elastic had truly given up. Daine tried to drag her hair back before it stuck to her sweaty face, but this just left her with straw and horsehair strung through the curls. Numair, smiling, beckoned her over. She eyed him suspiciously.

“Lean here,” he instructed, tapping the wall between his legs. As she did so – with notable reluctance, he noticed with a sniff – he took the elastic from his hair and pulled it over his wrist. With Daine propped against the wall, his knees gangly around her and her shoulders pulled up so high that it looked like she was trying to retract her head up to her ears, he hunched forward and began ruffling his fingers through her hair, gently loosening knots and horsehair.

He worked in silence, Daine as still as she could get with her back to him. Sugar had followed her over and was lipping at her hands for attention or treats, but Daine seemed too distracted to attend. 

“You lost control again,” he pointed out softly as he worked her hair into three equal chunks with surprising agility, considering it had been years since he’d done this. “When you were healing. Yes, you thought I was in trouble, but you still shapeshifted without your consent or control, and if Raven hadn’t been there to stop you from fleeing, you likely would have been lost to it. I know you’re determined to make your way on your own, but that frightens me. You go healing when I’m not here.”

“I’m an adult,” Daine murmured, her voice husky. He had begun to weave the three chunks of her hair into a loose plait, fingers deft as they worked. “You promised you’d let me find my own way.”

“And I will. I just don’t think it’s appropriate that I, a much more experienced mage, stand by without telling you that that way doesn’t need to be straight back into the black. I can place a wall in your mind that lets you use your magic as you please with every downfall that might become you if you’re reckless with it, _except_ you getting sucked into the shape of the animal you’re fixing up.”

Daine was quiet. He slowed his work, taking care to make sure he wasn’t plaiting the horsehair in, even if this meant carefully brushing it clean with his fingers where it wasn’t already woven into shape. She was fond of her glorious hair in a way he knew she wasn’t about the rest of her, somehow, considering how kind her mind and lovely her smile. He wanted to do it justice for her. 

“You’ve done so well with fighting the fear of your magic, of animals,” he said softly, aware of the horse watching him. “I’ve seen you go from barely able to stand having birds overhead to proudly walking through a full stable, greeting every horse. You don’t get overwhelmed by the animals chattering anymore –”

“Because you muted me,” she muttered, her ears, he noticed, very red. This conversation must be hard for her. “You made it so they’re quiet.”

“I took that off months ago,” he said idly.

Daine went, if possible, stiller.

“You did it, Daine. I just gave you the tools to find your feet. I can do the same with this. It’s such an easy block and you won’t feel a thing. No more catching feathers or fur, no more losing shape in the middle of the Bog. You can just focus on learning your healing craft without fearing falling into the animal you’re with. Won’t you let me help you?”

He tied the elastic in, letting the plait fall heavy and neat down the middle of her back. Daine turned to look at him, reaching up to touch her hair with both hands and drawing the plait through her fingers with an air of surprise. He flicked a piece of hay from her dirt-smudged cheek, delighting in her shy smile, and reached up to tease his loose hair out with his fingers. This made him wobbly. She caught his knees and held him steady until he was done and could beam at her from within the curtain of his long hair.

“Thank you,” she said, delighting him, before, “but no. I’m getting better, you said. And if I’m going to keep finding things to trip me over in my magic, I need to know how to handle them on my own. You showed me I  _ can  _ get control over them … now I need to show I can do it without you.” It was her turn to reach up and flick hay from his shirt, though she had to tiptoe to do it which made him laugh. “You’re not always going to be here, are you?”

His laugh faded and he looked down at her, sorry for the glum look in her eyes. He was sorry too for all the space between Galla and Tortall. It felt unbearable. 

“No,” he admitted. “I’m not. I worry you’ll lose yourself …”

“Well, if I do, you and Savigny will just have to come get me, won’t you?” She tried a smile, but it wobbled too. “I trust you both. And every day I’m getting better. One day I won’t get lost anymore, you’ll see.”

“And I will be so proud of you, Daine,” he murmured, having to bow down the middle to manage a kiss on her hair but forcing himself anyway, so fond he was of this brave, wild, unique woman and her determination to manage her unruly magic. “Even prouder than I already am, if such a thing is possible.”

She flicked him, escaping his grasp with a haughty though pink-tinged look, clearly blushing through the dirt. “Flirt,” she muttered, scrubbing her nose with one hand and gesturing rudely with the other. He grinned at her. “Numair?”

“Yes, magelet?”

This earned him another rude gesture, which he tolerated fondly. It was worth it to see how the endearment made her flutter, caught between calling him a silly coquet and telling him off for being so bold. But she was deadly serious when she looped her arm around Sugar and leaned against her horse, nose scrunched and mouth in a stubborn line as she said, “What do you plan to do about Raven?”

He hadn’t expected that. It threw him for a moment, unsure of what she meant. 

“Observe, for now,” he said, watching her with great curiosity. “I’m nervous about how much attention she’s paying Savigny. I do not  _ like  _ violent people paying attention to those I love, and she seems like she has the potential to be very violent.”

Daine studied him with her grey eyes wary.

“I just think maybe you should be careful with her,” was her slow response, batting Sugar away as the horse mouthed at her plait. “I don’t think she means as much harm as she says. I think she might be … in trouble. Maybe. I don’t know.”

She touched at her nose in a gesture that triggered a memory.

“The vial,” he realised. “You  _ do  _ know what’s in it, don’t you? Was it poison, as you said?”

“I just know what it’s like to be drowning in confusion, is all,” she said, looking past him. He turned, with difficulty, considering he was still perched, to find Savigny looking exceptionally fresh and clean compared to Daine, who was horse-grimy, and Numair, who was ruffled from a sleepless night. As Savigny came to lean upon the wall, on the other side to Daine and the horse and Numair’s dangling legs, she finished: “I think she was asking for your help in the best way she knew how, but she didn’t expect you. You fuzzed her up. You baffle people with how you look at things, sometimes, and I bet someone surrounded by plots wasn’t ready for you to just be kind. It’s lonely living in a mask.”

“If this is about Raven, I disagree,” said Savigny mildly. Numair was enjoying the vantage point his perch gave him, even if it was beginning to hurt his rear, and took advantage of it to ruffle his fingers in Savigny’s soft hair. It smelled lovely, coated in a conditioning oil that scented his fingers, and he grinned to realise he was getting leftover hay tumbled into those terrific curls. “She’s dangerous, not some sad stray puppy needing soft attention to stop her biting. She chose the mask. Don’t pity her.”

“But I do,” said Daine faintly, looking away from them both. “She makes me very sad. I’d help her, if she’d let me.”

There was a curious feeling in the intense way Savigny was staring at Daine, one that Numair was afraid to begin unpicking. He was certain he wouldn’t like what he found at the centre of it.

Numair retrieved his fingers from Savigny’s hair, sniffing the oil and applying it to a strand of his hair, just to see. It smelled like an oaky cross between a faux rose scent and the lingering notes of something fruity. A strange, divine smell. 

Savigny tore his gaze away from Daine to glance at him, smiling gently.

“I keep jars of it fixed up in my room,” he said, reaching up to curl the single strand of Numair’s oiled hair through his fingers. “You’re welcome to it, if you please. I’ll even work it in for you, if you wait for me to return. What a treat for us both that will be.”

“Vain brats,” said Daine, though she grinned. “Is there ever a minute you’re not trying to bed the other?”

“Never,” declared Numair, almost toppling himself off the wall as he leaned down to lean his mouth and nose against Savigny’s upturned face, just so he could feel the man smile against him.

“Sluts,” he heard Daine whisper to Sugar, Numair choking with shock as he barked out a laugh and promptly fell from the wall. Savigny buckled as he hoisted him back up to his feet. It was Savigny’s turn to make a rude gesture at Daine, and the odd tension of the conversation was lost. 

“If we’re done, I must go,” said Savigny, leaving Numair as he went to his horse’s stall and reached over the divider to pet the spotted nose that extended to sniff at him. “I’ve business in the lower cities.”

Daine and Numair, as one, tensed. Neither of them had missed that Savigny was angry about Adel, and angrier yet that both Donatien and Constant had been caught in the crossfire. Numair would be haunted until his dying days, he was certain, by the memory of finding Sav trying to calm the hysterical Donatien. The expression that had been on Sav’s face, Donatien’s ragged breathing, the gulping way Donatien had cried, the way Sav had held him and tried, unsuccessfully, to coax calm from him; it had been an all-too-vivid reminder that this wasn’t the first person these people had loved who’d died horribly in front of them. Because of this knowledge, neither liked that Savigny was vanishing for longer and longer hours to the lower city, coming back quick-tempered and liable to snap

“Is the king recovering from his wounds?” Numair asked, knowing Donatien falling to the assassin’s knife in his ill-thought-out attempt to brawl Adel’s murderer was a sore spot for Savigny, who felt it should have been him who’d beaten Donatien to the kill. 

“Reportedly,” Savigny said.

He saddled his horse in silence.

Numair turned back to Daine, the fun of the last few minutes fading. She was watching Savigny and fiddling with the end of her plait. He distracted her with something he’d meant to bring up, but had only remembered as he’d fallen from the wall and felt it heavy in his pocket.

“Daine,” he began, sliding the book he’d found in the catacombs free of his clothes. She barely glanced at him. He knew that would shortly change. “I should have told you about this before, but I wanted to be certain nothing was damaging in there.”

Now, he had her attention. She reached out and took it, opening it to the first page and reading. He watched her eyes widen as she realised what it was.

“Lord Dieudonné wrote this?” she breathed.

Savigny reappeared from the stall, hurrying over to stare at the book in her hands. “What is that?” he asked. “When did you take that?”

Numair said nothing as Savigny slid into the stall with Daine, leaning over her shoulder as he read the page she was on. Comically – or it would have been, had the situation not been so potentially fraught – he made the same expression of surprise that she had when he registered what he was reading.

“Father studied you?” he asked Daine, blinking with surprise. 

Daine flipped through the book, skimming it. “Yeah,” she said. “It wasn’t really a secret, I just never figured you need know. Numair, you look like you’ve found some terrible thing. I was never hurt. He just wanted to know what my magic could do.”

Numair shifted uneasily. For the most part, she was correct. Dieudonné  _ had  _ simply tested the limits of her magic, which Numair had found hugely revealing to read about. It had been what convinced him that he could slide a wall between the part of her that was pulling her into animal shape and the part of her that healed, letting her choose to shapeshift only when she was ready. But the end of it …

“I marked some pages,” he said quietly. “I think you should read them, when you’ve time, and come to me when you’re done if you need to talk about it. I don’t believe he meant you harm.”

“Was harm done?” asked Savigny, his tone icy. Numair recalled his revelation about Cole and knew Savigny would respond furiously to the knowledge someone had hurt Daine anyway, despite his protectiveness.

“I’m not sure,” was Numair’s cautious answer.

Daine had turned to the first of the marked pages and was skimming the cramped lines of notes. There was more there than she’d be able to read while standing in a horse stall with her brother breathing over her shoulder, but Numair knew she’d hit the gist of the experiment.

“He put my blood in  _ Constant? _ ” she blurted out, head jerking up to stare at Numair, appalled. “Why!?”

Savigny didn’t appear to be breathing either. Numair hurried to sketch in the gaps.

“It seemed the late queen was acting upon information that magic, especially outside of the Gift, could act as a kind of contagion,” he said, remembering what the Red Temples, Yahzed’s temples, had been stating in their sermons. “That it was an evil that spread with loose morality. A slow degradation of those it influenced. She didn’t seem certain, but then, Daine, you arrived, and with your arrival came some odd behaviours beginning to appear in the palace animals that you were exposed to. Then there came an incident where apparently you, Savigny, and Donatien attempted to run away? They loosed hounds to scent you and the hounds refused, the horses throwing their riders.”

Daine had cringed back at the reminder. “They  _ whipped  _ them,” she hissed. “They were just protecting us. They were scared we’d be punished.”

Sav, softly, and touching two of his fingers to his cheek as though tracing a memory, murmured, “I was.”

That had been in the notebook too, Numair recalled with a grimace. Dieudonné had written the details of the incident out with the detached disinterest appropriate to an academic text, but Numair had noted the harsh slashes of ink and the way the nib had dug into the parchment as the words had been written. As the long-dead Hartholm had written of the man who’d struck Savigny across the face with his riding crop, Dieudonné had been furious. Numair wondered if it was the person Daine had mentioned so many months before, the man who’d been whipped for daring to hit the prince’s beloved Gift.

“It started some wondering if the rumours were right, if you did have some form of contagious magic,” Numair explained, wrenching his mind away from imagining Savigny’s face welted and raw. “Lord Hartholm, who had care of you by that point, was asked to investigate. He didn’t care for some of the suggestions he was being given on ways to test it, or ways to ‘contain’ you.”

Daine snuck Savigny a look under her thick lashes, mouth thoughtful. “He cared for me,” she said in a low, gentle voice. “In his own stiff way. You do know he did, Sav. Don’t go thinking he was hurtful. Whatever he did, he did for good reason. I’ve faith.”

“Why Constant?” was all Savigny asked.

“Daine spent a lot of time around him and it was noticed, one day, that Constant had a knack for hawks,” said Numair. “They noticed his latent wild magic and seemed to decide Daine was the cause, which I doubted when I read it. My feeling was it was simply a coincidence. I’m certain more souls are animal hearted than we know about, so subtle a power it can be. But there was an incident with a dog who bit Constant –”

“Oh pox,” said Daine, giving the book a furious stare. “Who  _ told  _ him.”

Numair, ignoring her, continued, “Daine was bitten too when she got in trying to stop the handler from beating the dog. Lord Hartholm seems to think that, while you were caring for Constant in the aftermath and during the scuffle, Daine, there  _ was  _ contagion. Blood, not magic, though he theorised that maybe with wild magic those two things are more related than we know. He cites that Constant’s ‘knack’ for hawks became something much more in the time after, with him – he was three? Four? I think – calling hawks from the sky, much to his nurse’s horror, and beginning to tell stories about riding with them as they flew. They’re quite gruesomely excellent. There’s one in there where he talks about hunting and eating a pigeon on a lady’s window planter while the lady shrieked. It’s wonderful.”

“So  _ I  _ made his magic worse?” Daine asked.

“I think he’d say better, if he got to fly with a hawk,” Savigny said before Numair could, finally ceasing his looming. “I really do need to go. Daine, let me read that when you’re done.”

Daine didn’t look like she even wanted to read it anymore.

“Hey,” Numair said, leaning his long self over the wall so he could tip her expression up using his fingers under her chin. “I’m not convinced you had anything to do with Constant’s magic sparking up so fierce. Fright can cause surges in ability, sometimes. Mithros knows it did with me. And even if you did, Constant loves his magic. He loves being able to summon hawks, and I bet if we go telling him he can  _ ride  _ with their minds as they fly, he’s going to expire from glee. If it is a contagion, which I very much doubt, what harm has it done?”

“But you seemed so serious when you gave me the book,” she said doubtfully.

“Of course. It’s always confronting, to read words written by those we’ve lost. But precious too, I think. And I didn’t give it to you immediately despite it being about you, so you’d be well within your rights to be mad at me for that.”

“Oh.” She studied the book for a moment longer before tucking it into her own pocket, turning to look at Savigny as he walked his saddled horse out. “I’m not mad about that. We’ve all got things we won’t tell. Sav, will you be home for dinner?”

“Unlikely,” said Savigny, stopping to kiss Numair before mounting up in an easy motion that gave Numair a dizzying view of the man’s fine rear. “Don’t wait for me.”

And then he was gone.

Numair, gazing wistfully after his man, jerked his brain back to the topic that had been previously at hand. “What were you going to say about Raven?”

Daine dodged past him, going for her saddle and bridle. “Dunno,” she said with a wicked stare, waving him out of the way. “I’ll tell you in a few weeks when it suits me.”

There was little he could say to that. She had a point.

“I thought you said you weren’t mad,” he pouted.

“I’m not,” was her reply. “But there’s not a person alive who grew up with Savigny and didn’t learn to be petty.”

Daine also vanished off on an errand she wouldn’t divulge, leaving Numair to be mournful and alone in the study. This didn’t last long. He soon distracted himself with the monumental task of picking apart the assassin’s magic he’d trapped in the perfume bottle all those months ago during the attack on Donatien at the palace. Numair hadn’t made much progress on it, aside from finding that it was a nasty twist of Gift that would certainly have killed Rainary, had it stayed within her. And with every day that had passed between now and then, it had degraded further. 

It was familiar though, he had realised this. He just hadn’t managed to figure out  _ why _ .

He began to read to try and jog his memory, skimming through the methodologies of magic scrolls he had upon his desk. None of them helped. The books on Gallan Gifts through the ages on the shelf near him didn’t help either. He drifted to Savigny’s desk and began pawing through the books there, books on Maren, on Tyra, on …

He picked up a thin text on the battle magic of Carthak, feeling ill. He hadn’t seen this one before. It was well-thumbed; Savigny loved reading, though he had little time to pursue it. Numair wondered what other pursuits Savigny loved that he’d sidelined in order to live his life as someone else’s Gift and Spymaster.

Eventually, Numair retreated to the window-seat and committed to reading the book, quickly overtaking where Savigny had marked his page.

Midway through, he realised why the magic he’d extracted from Rainary was familiar. He  _ had  _ seen magic like that before. In Carthak. He’d pulled something very similar from his university lover before Ozorne had had him executed. 

Numair went cold, setting his finger against the page and trying to think through the buzzing in his ears. It wasn’t exactly the same, or Numair would have realised the connection sooner. This one was nastier, and much more refined. Numair hadn’t even realised back then that the magic had been designed to make his lover ill, so shapeless had it been. It was only looking back with the more finished version of the trick that he could see that what he’d removed had been the bones of a technique that was, here in Rainary, perfected. If Numair hadn’t been there, she would have died.

It didn’t feel like a coincidence. 

He began to thumb through the book, though it was thin, as he was certain he would find something in particular in there. It didn’t take long to find, in the small section on mercenary naval warfare. Carthak was extraordinarily good at cut-and-run coastal attacks, harrying shorelines and smaller ships with their own unmarked vessels equipped with university-trained battlemages and mercenaries armed with the best magic battle the Carthaki military could come up with. Numair had spent a good eighteen months of his initial employment as a Tortallan court mage helping identify and replicate Carthak’s military magic. What he found given a single line on the tail end of this book wasn’t something he’d recreated during that time, though he suspected he  _ had  _ mentioned it existed. He’d just never seen it before.

After all, though he knew the theory, he’d never been a battlemage, and this wasn’t something they’d use against a single mage on the run. Not even a mage like him. 

The assassin who’d killed Adel had used a modified liquid fire to do it. Naval liquid fire exploded on impact with devastating force, often loaded into catapults and flung mercilessly onto wooden decks of opposing ships or across walls into the huddled crowds within keeps. It was a rain of devastation. The substance Numair had found still in traces around the shattered remains of the pressurised capsule that had held it to the arrow was similar, but it required manual ignition and was thicker, more gelatinous. Much harder to clean from skin. It burned hotter but faster, likely too fast to more than sear ships before being put out by sea spray. But, on a human, such a high, intense heat would cook to the bone ruthlessly.

Numair set the book aside. He felt ill. Had his refusal to be Ozorne’s battlemage mattered at all? It hadn’t seemed to stop their march onward in making better and more efficient ways to kill people.

He decided to switch his attention to something else before he drove himself into a depression, setting aside the book and his grim thoughts about battle magic and going to find the box which held the fire opal they’d stolen from Donatien’s rooms. He was hoping he could overcome the compulsions within it with his own magic, reversing the influence on a – consenting – mind. If so, perhaps he could unwind the damage on Donatien, if Donatien ever permitted him to do so. At the very least, Numair ached for the chance to try to reverse the damage done to Savigny’s sense of self-worth. The box, however, wasn’t in its usual place in the lower section of Numair’s desk, where it should remain twice mage-locked. It wasn’t on Savigny’s desk either. It didn’t seem to be anywhere in the study.

Numair pondered it for a while, before deciding that Savigny must have taken it below, for some reason. It gave him a reason to go for a walk, and he fetched a warm cloak from Savigny’s wardrobe, a leather bag of water, and a snack to take down with him. There was little left of the wreckage of the east wing. They’d had it cleaned up, the hole blocked for ‘safety’. In reality, it was sealed except for an illusioned entrance that Savigny made and only he and Numair knew the existence of. It was this entrance that Numair levitated himself down now, vanishing below the earth and on his way without anyone noticing him.

The absolute darkness through the catacombs, as usual, frightened him deeply. He didn’t let it show though, just ambled on with his Gift guiding him to where he could sense a familiar pulse of his and Savigny’s Gifts intertwined. The source was a construct they’d built together and placed outside the door of Savigny’s hideaway, shaped as two roses entwined together, one black and the other pink. It had been a silly, fun experiment to see if they could, but the construct also gave off a comforting light after the darkness of the passage, and it was something both of them could guide themselves with.

Inside the rooms, which were more Savigny than Dieudonné these days, Numair searched for the fire opal. Savigny wasn’t as cautious down here with ensuring his paperwork was obscured, since there were spells he’d created which would incinerate any paper within the room if someone other than Numair or Savigny broke through the wards to get in. It was also messier than usual, Numair surprised to find that the study was a chaotic jumble of papers and scrolls flung about wildly. Savigny had been in a feverish mood, his usually careful handwriting all over the place and with no reason for the manic messiness. Numair picked up a few sheets of parchment which had drifted to the floor, returning them to the desk lest a draft blow them against the wards, which would destroy the parchments.

Nosiness overcame him at the desk, scanning what lay there in the open. One day Savigny would take him to task for his curiosity and, on that day, Numair would remind him that Numair was notoriously nosy and what did Savigny expect? He was as his nature had made him.

He was still smiling at this thought when he realised what he was reading.

_ By decree of His Majesty King Donatien V, in the event of the death of Marquis Savigny de Hartholm, lesser lord of Hartholm Fief, the titles, wealth, and assets of the deceased shall be divided as such. To the Crown goes … _

Numair jerked back, the sharp movement shoving a dry report on wheat losses over the month of August onto the will. That was preferable. Numair did not want to read Savigny’s final wishes, and nor did he want to know why Savigny had seen fit to sequester himself down here and ponder what came after his demise.

Sick curiosity, despite his preferences, got the better of him.

He slid the wheat report aside, letting his gaze fall where it may. It was, of course, drawn to the familiar.

_ To the Tortallan mage, Numair Salmalín, those books which belong to the personal library of the deceased that the Lord Constant de Hartholm has no need of in the daily running of the estate. _

“Nope,” Numair said, shoving the wheat report back over it. “Goodbye, that’s enough of you. Oh, hello.”

He’d been distracted from his horror by a map which, on closer examination, Numair found had been marked in a quick code that took very little time to figure out. Numair had a brain that liked puzzles, and this was a very simple substitution cypher that had evidently been used not only in a hurry but also off the top of one’s head. It was the covert version of a book-keeper’s personal shorthand. Numair himself had a simple quick-use cipher for note taking, though his was moderately more complex than this and involved a mathematical formula for decoding that existed only in his head. It was, he’d realised, never going to be broken by Savigny, who considered maths to be his greatest enemy and regarded all numerical activities with the same deep distrust Numair gave to wild horses. 

The map had the temples marked, those that had been built or overtaken by Yahzed’s followers indicated separately. Numair was alarmed to see how they were beginning to cluster, truly pushing out all but the most stubborn. The only other temples that seemed to be holding were the Mother Goddess’s, and a small cluster of Weiryn’s in the lower Bog, near the external gates. Numair assumed that, demographically, that would be where those who hunted outside the city would live. There were other events marked upon the maps: recent marks dated over the past week which showed unrest, physical attacks against mages, burnings against Yahzed’s Red Temples, food and perfume thefts. It was a fascinating, alarming look at a city under pressure.

Below it was another coded report, this one which did use a numerical cypher. Not Savigny’s then, Numair thought with a grin, before realising that this – which he wouldn’t have been able to simply eyeball to solve – he did know. It was familiar.

It was Descartin’s.  _ Descartin,  _ George’s man, was reporting to Savigny too.

Numair was beginning to get dizzy at how often the streams of his life were overlapping. It wasn’t a damning report, as far as reports went, but simply appeared to be a second-hand account of information from within the palace that Descartin had gathered from one of his own birdies. A very brief, very chilling list of palace alliances dated two weeks prior. 

What caught Numair’s eye was the mention of Adel. Decoded, it read:

_ The King is supported by the Hartholm Fief (Constant de Hartholm), the bulk of the Palace Guard, though they are thin in ranks (allied to Captain Rainary Gaétansra, who holds them to their loyalty), & the potential for Darragon Fief to return to Alaire’s side. Historically, Darragon lords held position as prime minister, acting as advisor to the king and internal management of the upper nobility. If Darragon returns to this vacancy, the King will be strengthened. _

Numair looked at that for a long time. The rest was a flood of names he didn’t know well, though he saw both Lady Eloise and Viscount Pech were listed as of little interest, as severed from the political reality of their kingdom as they were. It didn’t escape his notice that beside Pech’s name, the notes read  _ Darragon Fief will be weaker under the hand of the Viscount, if it eventuates that Lord Adel is removed.  _ It read, he realised, very much like a to-do list, if the person to do-ing desired to ruin a kingdom. It was dated before Adel’s death.

And Constant’s name was right there on the top.

There was no reason Numair should be allowed in except that security on the Gallan palace was ridiculously slack. Therefore, he wasn’t at all surprised when the guards barely looked at him passing through along with the daily crowd of those who passed in and out of these gates. It was true that the Tortallan guards didn’t stop everyone entering and exiting the palace in Corus during daylight hours, but Numair felt that a week after a gruesome murder of a noble – one that was still causing people to lash out in the lower cities – a little more effort wouldn’t go amiss.

A guard did stop him as he approached the servant’s entrance, mildly unsure how he was going to find his way to Constant from here. This one was dressed in the same uniform Numair recognised from Rain, so he gave his name and requested to see her. It seemed easier than explaining he was here to see Constant.

It wasn’t Rain, however, who came to collect Numair from where he lingered in a waiting room where he’d been sat. Numair looked up to find, of all people, Pech de Darragon strolling in. He was dressed in the blacks of mourning, though with a red sash across his chest that Numair didn’t know the purpose of.

“Rainy is busy attending to the bickering happening in our upper echelons,” said Pech without preamble. “I presume you’re actually here to visit Constant? Come, then.”

“Bickering?” Numair queried. He wondered if he should express his sorrow about Adel, but Pech didn’t seem inclined to be supported or pitied. He just looked irritable, and sober. 

“Surprised you didn’t know about our divisive visitors,” was Pech’s dull response. “They’re Tortallan, after all.”

Numair missed a beat, almost falling over his own feet. He hadn’t realised that when George had said a delegation was on their way that that meant they were  _ here _ . He had no idea how he hadn’t heard, though he had been sealed into the estate the last week working to distract himself.

They didn’t speak again until Pech was requesting entry into a suite of rooms that was fine enough that Numair was surprised it was Constant’s, as it must have been. Constant was sitting within, having aggressively folded himself into a plush chair where he was shredding pieces of dried meat to share between his four companions, his two dogs, Pippy, and Rum. All of them looked around as Numair and Pech entered.

Constant didn’t brighten to see them, which was Numair’s first warning.

“Everything’s going wrong,” Constant said, sitting upright with the dogs scattering. He looked grim and unhappy. “They won’t let me into the meeting room with the Tortallans, and I don’t like that d’Ayvelles is heading the meeting. He doesn’t have the  _ right _ .”

“His wife is sister by birth to Uncle Adel,” was Pech’s quiet response. “He’s the closest we have right now to a Darragon lord, if they’re still denying Aunt Elspeth her claim.”

“If you’d stop trying to reject it –” Constant fired back, but Pech was shaking his head with his lip curled. “Pech! We need someone in there. They’ll let  _ you  _ in.”

“I have no desire to run Darragon,” said Pech. “I haven’t the ability and it’s a keystone fief. I’m not a viable option, whatever our wishes. Why do you think they married me to Solange?” A trickle of spite layered his voice. “They didn’t want her to be powerful or political, so they gave her a husband who is weak in both in an attempt to cripple her. I’m not even trueborn Darragon blood. Constant, use your head.  _ Everything  _ they do is a game. Everything aims to weaken those they want weak and strengthen those they don’t. I’m alive because I’m useless. My uncle and my parents and my sisters are dead because they weren’t, don’t you understand? I don’t wish to die, so it suits me to remain useless. You should do the same.”

“Savigny isn’t useless and he’s alive,” snapped Constant.

Pech muttered, “An astounding oversight I’m certain they’ll be aiming to correct in short measure,” which, Numair felt, wasn’t necessary. Constant flinched.

“Constant, I do think you’re in danger,” Numair interjected, but neither Constant nor Pech looked at all surprised by this. “You knew?”

“The assassin was shooting at me too,” said Constant glumly. “Don attacked him so he couldn’t get a clean shot. Rain’s going wild trying to figure out how to keep all of us safe as well as the Tortallans. Do you know them?”

“I don’t even know who they sent,” Numair admitted. “Have they met with the king yet?”

Constant and Pech exchanged a strained look.

“Don’s not well,” was Constant’s evasive comment. Numair almost groaned. He didn’t need to know more; the king had clearly spiralled again. “Ossika is keeping a close … eye … on him.”

“You mean she’s drugging him out of his mind to keep from anyone realising he’s lost it,” Pech said without any tempering of the comment. “I doubt he even knows the Tortallans are here, which is fortunate, quite frankly. I was expecting far more class than your mage king sent, Salmalín. Evidently we are still your nation’s foppish mountain embarrassments.”

Numair glanced to Pech, unsure of how to read that. 

“The knight seems nice,” Constant said, sinking back down to his chair. Earnest crawled into his lap, earning a hug. “I think you mentioned him once, Numair. Sir Raoul?”

Just like that, Numair’s day was looking up.

“Hey, Pech,” he said, deciding not to bother with niceties. Pech didn’t seem to care for them anyway. “What would it take for you to agree to deliver a message to someone for me?”

Quick as a whip, Pech responded, “Let me paint you. I’ll deliver anything you please for that. You have such a strange face, I’m intrigued.”

Numair said, “Done,” and tried not to think too much about whether that was a compliment or not.

Raoul burst through the door of Constant’s rooms and, without hesitation, barrelled towards Numair, bellowing, “Salmalín!” as he came. Constant, who had been drinking a mug of juice Numair had foisted on him to help calm him down, choked on it. Bon Bon gave Raoul a deeply affronted stare; Earnest got so excited by the shouting he ran in place, his paws finding no traction on the stone.

Numair, looking up to see his huge friend hurtling towards him, leapt to his feet, bellowed, “Goldenlake!” and launched himself into a bearhug that cracked his spine in at least three different places. They proceeded to bawl at each other in their traditional greeting, which included a lot of shouting, the vigorous slapping of each other’s backs, and at least two more crushing hugs.

Numair felt rather sniffly by the end of it. He’d  _ missed  _ this.

When they were done, he looked around to introduce Raoul to his Gallan companions, only to find that everyone in the room was gaping at them. Numair considered the last few minutes. It occurred to him that Galla was a very  _ quiet _ place. They did little bellowing. Raoul, among even Constant and Pech, who were odd Gallans, definitely stood out.

“For the first time,” said Pech, “I actually believe you’re Tortallan.”

“Is  _ everyone  _ in Tortall this big and loud?” asked Constant, which Raoul boomed a laugh at that had everyone else flinching. 

“No,” said Numair, though then he thought of Alanna, who wasn’t big but certainly could use the lungs the Mother had gifted her. “Ah, I mean. Some of them.”

Pech touched his throat with two fingers, murmuring, “Weiryn walk with me, we’re doomed.”

“Amazing,” whispered Constant, blatantly starry-eyed. 

Raoul had crouched to pet Earnest, who was having an absolute meltdown from excitement. Raoul’s hands alone were bigger than the puppy’s head as Raoul rubbed him so vigorously he was essentially polishing the floor with the fluffy animal.

“It’s fantastic to see you in person, Salmalín,” Raoul said, eyes on Numair even as he continued weaponizing Earnest’s wiggles. “I can’t say I didn’t expect the worst when we stormed Sinthya’s dungeon and found nothing but your blood. How’s the arm?”

“Fine,” said Numair, which wasn’t really a lie. The heat of summer meant he barely noticed the ache in the bone anymore. “I’m very pleased to be alive to greet you, certainly. How fare the negotiations?”

Raoul grimaced. There was a lot to talk about; there was little time to do it.

“Perhaps it’s a positive that your king is unwell,” he said, looking past Numair to where Constant lingered. “It’s Constant, right? Numair’s told me of you. Well, the only noble we have appropriate to send as an envoy to a foreign king was our Lord Heylor of Tirragen. He’s … traditional. Ill-pleased by being sent to, ah.”

“Negotiate with a dandy king,” said Pech breezily, Numair looking at him. “Oh, don’t be coy, Sir Knight. Constant may be blessedly naïve, but I’ve heard all your lowlander insults for us. What is it they banter about courting a Gallan lady down in your charming Corus?”

Raoul shifted awkwardly, glancing at Constant. Numair was honestly baffled. He rarely ‘bantered’.

“One must always check below the dress before committing to anything,” said Pech with a sniff. “Though, I admit, we’re hardly much better. We do make such nasty comments about …” He looked Raoul up and down, slowly. “… barbarians and their brides.”

“I don’t get it,” said Constant into the uncomfortable silence. “Why do you …?”

“Never mind it, Constant,” said Numair quietly. “It’s not funny. Prejudice never is, especially prejudice inspired by some inked lines on a map.”

“Yes, well, unfortunately, Tirragen played right into those prejudices,” said Raoul in a glum voice. “He’s been skirting the line of appropriate this entire time, and the nobles here seem very eager to accept the offence he intends. They’re anxious about Harailt of Aili because he’s a mage and no one told  _ us _ you’d just had a mage murder down the damn street. They seem to have no idea what to make of me –”

“We don’t have knights as Tortall does,” Pech supplied from where he was slouching against a wall, nibbling at his nails. “Our knights are mostly courtiers. We’re not a warlike country. We have two open borders to peaceable nations who don’t bother us, and the rest of us are girt by mountain. Combat knights fell out of favour two generations ago as an unneeded expense and an inappropriate outreach of the crown’s power into outer fiefs. They’re probably expecting you to … dance.”

Raoul blinked.

Numair hid a smile, imagining it. He was certain Raoul  _ could  _ dance, though he’d never borne witness to it. He was also certain that Raoul couldn’t dance like a Gallan.

“Well, whatever it is, Tirragen is trying to show off how cheaply he can buy peace with Galla,” Raoul said, scruffing his fingers through his beard with a deep sigh. “Which isn’t going well when we’re negotiating for food to stop a populace from starving. I’m expecting an international incident within hours that Roald’s still going to be trying to smooth over come his reign. We should have just waited for a Gary from Corus. Harailt’s doing his best, but they don’t want an inch of him.”

“Pox,” muttered Numair, channelling Daine. “Did Jon speak to you about a marriage with Kalasin?”

Raoul pulled a face. “We were told not to mention it yet. Thayet’s playing unhappy queen about it, but I’m sensing Jon’s not pleased either. If we think we’re going to lose negotiations, we have the authorization to float the idea – but nothing concrete. I’m holding to not mentioning it. With Tirragen’s ability to play politics, he’d probably cock it right up. Not that it will matter if we can’t get your king out of bed.”

“He has to get up,” said Constant. “The nobles are agitating for a curfew on mages, which will mean city-wide mage-marking. I can’t see how we’ll stop it at this point without Don on our side. Adel scared them all over just when they were forgetting to live in fear. They think they’re going to be murdered within months.”

He looked down at his feet, hiding his eyes. Bon Bon leant her head on him with a soft whine.

“Speaking of,” said Pech, angling himself upright. “While you’re here, Salmalín, you should probably let me mage mark you.”

Numair jerked around, staring at Pech with what he knew was a deadly expression, though Pech seemed unimpressed. Raoul leaned back on his heels, eyes narrowed.

“Don’t glare,” Pech drawled. “It’s a fake compound. I brought it to mark Constant, unless we’re still pretending the boy is just so pure demon hawks take to his hand for the pleasure of it. It’ll do for you too, and dear Marquis de Curls. Might as well do darling Donatien at the same time.”

His watery stare didn’t waver. Numair took that information stoically, feeling it shiver into existence in the room.

“Thought your kings weren’t allowed to be Gifted,” Raoul commented.

“They aren’t,” said Pech. “I doubt there are many mages who could prove Donatien is Gifted, his parents had it buried it in him so deep. I suspect we’re standing in the room with one of the few who could, though you’d probably kill him trying to prove it if you yanked on the bindings too hard. Don’t look so appalled, Salmalín. Are you still surprised by what people will do to get their scions in positions of power?”

“Does Don know he’s got the Gift?” Constant demanded. 

“Who even knows what the babe king knows.” Pech dug through his bag and procured a pot of blue paint, which he tossed to Numair for him to examine. “Savigny definitely does. The Gift is taught to use the monarch’s Gift to keep it so low it’s invisible, if the monarch is Gifted enough it’s needed. I’ve never had the impression it’s needed for our dear king, though who can really tell. Maybe Savigny is just that good.”

“And if this is so secret, how do you know?” asked Raoul, his tone suspicious.

Pech simply stated, without emotion, “Solange. We were friends, once.”

It didn’t seem like there was a way out of it. Numair percolated all that information down, to examine later, and stood.

“I think I need to speak to the king,” he said quietly, Constant leaping up as well as though Numair had fired him up with this soft declaration. “Do we think we can manage that?”

“We can try,” Pech said with a shrug. “Your bear friend?”

“I should go back down,” said Raoul. He looked to Numair. “We’ll speak again before Tirragen gets us ejected from the country. And Numair?”

Numair looked at him, waiting.

Raoul, with a grin, said, “I’m disappointed in your outfit. It’s positively decorous.”

There was a brief but terrifying moment where they finally managed to gain entry to Donatien’s chambers, only to find that Donatien, somehow, wasn’t there. Constant promptly panicked, Pech began to chain smoke with idle anxiety, and Numair pondered. The dogs sat by the door, calm despite the empty bed with its musty, unmade covers. The room smelled of sweat and close habitation. There were no signs of a struggle.

Numair didn’t think violence had happened here.

He considered where the king would go. His first guess would be to his animals, as it seemed what Daine would do and Numair suspected that Daine and Donatien were the most alike out of all of them. Then he discarded that. He doubted the king would be feeling up to dodging the palace staff to get across the grounds to the menagerie, no matter how much he wanted to pet a fish ferret. If he was up and about in the throes of his grief, he’d likely gone somewhere for what every one of them who was missing Adel wanted.

Answers.

“I know where he is,” said Numair to the others, certain in his knowledge. It was, after all, exactly where Numair would go if he lost Savigny, or Daine, or Constant.

They found the king sitting alone in his old chambers, dressed haphazardly and with his hair loose for the first time Numair had ever seen. It was lovely even in its rattiness, even when the curls were beginning to break apart and frizz at the ends. He looked a little like something sticky Earnest had pulled out from below a cupboard, but it served to make him look vulnerable rather than unattractive

“Should I …?” asked Constant uneasily, going to step into the room. 

Numair caught his arm, guiding him back towards Pech, who lingered. “Wait outside,” he ordered, shivering as he slid in front of Constant, into the room, and felt a tendril of something icy and familiar sliver into his core. The fearwood was here. It recognised him. “I’ll speak to him.”

He stepped fully inside and closed the door.

“Do you hear them, mage?” Don said as soon as the door was closed. Numair went and sat next to him on the bare bed frame, following the king’s gaze to where the opals were set into the hearth. Numair’s wards on them held. They couldn’t influence anyone. “The voices.”

“No,” admitted Numair. “I can feel the fearwood. It’s like a physical touch of being afraid, a finger dipped right into my chest. It’s horrible. But I don’t hear anything. My name is Numair, Majesty.”

Donatien looked at him, his eyes so red they made Numair’s water with sympathy.

“You called me Numair at the funeral,” Numair pressed. “I don’t think we should walk that back. I’m Numair before I’m a mage.”

“I’m afraid of you,” Don murmured without breaking his gaze. “I feel fear that you’re so near me. It’s not my fear. Or maybe it is. Constant told me this cursed wood, this place that’s driven me insane, he said it gives foresight. If I’d had foresight, I would have stopped Adel dying. If I call you Numair, will you call me Don? No one does anymore. I’m a king before I’m a man.”

He slouched into himself, visibly eroded by exhaustion. Numair snuck a glance at him, grim to see just how strongly the fearwood retained its grip on him. 

“I’m afraid,” repeated Don anxiously.

“Of me, yes,” said Numair. “There’s really no reason. I’m extremely domesticated.”

It didn’t even earn the flicker of a smile. Don was staring at the opals again. “For them,” he said, confusing Numair for a moment before he clarified. “For Sav, and Daine, and Constant. Someone killed Adel. I don’t know why, but I can guess. Darragon is loyal. Was loyal. Is. Pech is loyal, mostly. A strange man, but loyal. I don’t want Pech to die too. We were children together.”

“Don –” Numair began, but Don had swung himself up and was pacing, his movements jerky, like a marionette. 

“And the Hartholms, they’re our strength,” Don muttered, fretting at his hair and only increasing his resemblance to a boiled sweet. “If they fall, Scanra will take Hartholm. We’ll lose our graziers. Our wool. Without wool, we have to import cloth, textiles. We freeze. More income lost. A country is a balancing act, import in, export out. It tips, so easily. They’ll kill Constant. I can’t  _ stop  _ them killing Constant, unless I send him away? Where would I send him?”

He turned, briefly looking at the bed next to Numair before adjusting his gaze with a visible effort to focus on Numair.

“I could send him to Tortall,” Don said, lips white on his already pale face. Numair was careful not to react. “I was going to marry him to Eloise, but she’s a Silvain. They’re Alaire loyal too. They’ll kill her next, and Solange. Tortall won’t take Solange. They won’t accept a blind queen to their king’s sons, and she’s too old anyway once the princes are of age. You – you’ll take Constant, and Daine, yes? Just, take them and go. They’ll love Tortall. Show Constant the ocean.”

“Don,” breathed Numair, devastated by this shattered panic. He stood, reaching for the man and feeling it in his heart when Don flinched back as though Numair had drawn a sword on him instead. His hands dropped to his side, useless. “You can’t send your people away. You need them.”

Don smiled, which was ghastly.

“Ah, Numair,” he said, still smiling. “I’m never alone, not really. I haven’t been alone since Maman died. I’ll simply recreate those who are gone and never know the difference. It’s honestly a comfort, knowing that when they kill me I’ll die surrounded by those who went before me. Savigny … I don’t think he’ll leave Galla, though if anyone could convince him to go I think you could. I could try exiling him from the country, if it helps. You’ll help him create a life in Tortall that’s beautiful, won’t you? He loves to be beautiful. Please, promise me you’ll dance with him.”

Numair realised his eyes were damp, the backs of them aching from holding back his tears. It just  _ hurt _ , so much, to see someone brought so low. He wanted to help.

He didn’t know how.

Don had turned back to the hearth, pacing with those jittery strides. “I want to go under the fearwood, I think,” he declared. “I want to see what’s coming, with the knowledge that what I’m seeing is foresight. How else will I protect them?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Numair softly. “You’re under incredible strain. I don’t think the fearwood is careful about the pressures it places upon already taxed minds. I’ll do it.”

Don turned and looked at Numair, truly seeming to see him for the first time.

“I’ll go under the fearwood,” Numair explained to answer that stare. “You can keep watch over me while I do. You’ve done so before. Then we’ll know.”

“You trust me so much?” Don asked, seemingly baffled. Then, he straightened. “Very well. The least I can do is return that trust, even if you petrify me. Especially if you petrify me. I’ll guard you. I can do that.”

“You can,” said Numair. “I trust you.”

Numair woke on the road to Tortall, watching the darkness stealing the sky. This time, he wasn’t alone. 

He sat up, aware this was a dream and determined to understand it.

Constant stood waiting.

Numair staggered upright, walking to Constant and staring at him. It was easy; Constant stood taller than Savigny, who wasn’t a short man. His hair was long and tied back in a horsetail, as Numair usually had his. He was broad from manual labour, his smile easy and his eyes the same as they’d always been. He looked to be in his late twenties.

“Hello, Numair,” said the adult Constant.

“Well, you’re comforting,” Numair said with a thin smile. “Did you style your hair to match mine? How flattering.”

Constant just shrugged, turning and leading the way up the road.

“I’m here for a purpose this time,” Numair called after him, jogging to keep up. “None of your silly attempts to frighten me into submission. I want to know what’s coming. You can give me that. It’s your whole purpose for existing.”

“The future is frightening,” said Constant in a voice that was his but wasn’t too, as deep as it was. It wasn’t any different from any other man’s voice, but it made Numair shiver. It was bizarre to see a man with a man’s voice but Constant’s eyes. “I can’t offer anything but fear. Uncertainty is just fear without direction.”

“Savigny,” said Numair, refusing to be misled. “Show me what will happen to Savigny.”

“That’s a tall ask. Many things will happen to Savigny. He  _ will  _ die, eventually. All humans do. I sense that’s not what you’re interested in though. You want to see if his death looms close.”

Numair’s throat was dry. He slipped, catching himself as his foot crunched macabrely. 

Looking down, he found that the road was coated with beetles, and they were marching with them in an unsettling straight line.

He looked up and found that they were marching on Cría. 

“These beetles,” he whispered, shuddering as he felt them bumping against his boots, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of clicking many-jointed legs and tough, scalloped exoskeletons. “They’re from Carthak.”

“There’s so many of them,” said Constant in a voice that implied he was agreeing with a statement Numair hadn’t made. “They’re unstoppable. They’ll eat the world, if you let them.”

Numair planted his feet. He wasn’t going to lose his mind to this.

He was  _ furious  _ that this place had taken Donatien’s.

“Show me Savigny,” he demanded. “And Daine. And …” He hesitated, swallowing. “Show me the king, show me Donatien.”

Constant watched him without expression, and then he shifted his attention to look at something beyond Numair. Numair, feeling ill, feeling shaken loose, turned without being able to stop himself.

“Oh,” he said. It was only the thought of the beetles swarming him that stopped him sinking to his knees, though he wobbled still. The Hartholm estate loomed before him. They were standing on the street. Numair was, he realised, standing exactly where Adel had died. The Hartholm family crest was firm in its place, carved grandly into the wood. The gates were open. The estate was burning. 

And Savigny’s body was impaled against the gate, bloodied on the wood-carved raven that he was speared into. He was a ruined, formless shape, rotted and sagged and with carrion birds plucking at him. Numair stared at him until he thought his eyes would burn right out of his skull, unable, for the life of him, to tell from the decayed shape in front of him if Savigny had aged or not. 

“This doesn’t frighten me,” he said finally, when he managed to unstick his tongue from his suddenly dry mouth. “You don’t show literal futures, I know this. Something will happen, but it won’t be exactly like this.”

“I could,” said Constant lazily. “If I wanted to. Would you like to see something literal? Would  _ that  _ frighten you?”

Numair turned his back on Savigny, staring at the adult Constant, who stared back with a disinterest the real Constant would never show.

“I’m not afraid of you,” Numair rasped, lying.

“No,” said Constant, tilting his head. “You’re not afraid of  _ me _ . But you are afraid of failing. And you’re afraid that I know exactly what failure means to you. It’s the king of Galla giving up the shredded remains of what’s left of his heart. It’s the Gallans on the same endless road to Tortall as you, their families and homes in ruins. It’s a city burning, and it’s the end of the Hartholms, and it’s Savigny de Hartholm dead on the ever so sharpened point of his own family’s honour. You, Numair, are afraid of these things because each and every one of them indicates that you have failed in the one thing you cannot handle failing in. Each of them means that someone you promised to help … well, Numair Salmalín, who was Arram Draper, these things mean that you failed those people. And you  _ will  _ fail them. Is that literal enough for you?”

Numair backed up before catching himself, thinking for a gruesome moment that he was about to step back under Savigny’s corpse. But the estate was gone, and Savigny’s body with it. It was just him, and Constant, and the growing dark.

“But since you asked so kindly,” said Constant, reaching up as though to pull the sky down atop them. “Here. Your splendid, ruined future.”

And he was gone. Numair stood alone in a desolate place. The horizon was grey. Everything was rocks. There was no sky, no discernible direction. Just those rocks, sharp and cold underfoot, and the grey sky and the grey road and no sun or moon to be seen. He heard a sob. He heard the sound of someone slipping on those rocks, and a woeful cry of pain. 

He turned.

Daine crouched in the shale, her hair loose, her face wet from tears. She was gritting her teeth, the white of them startling through the caked-on dust that covered her. She was grey too, painted in the dirt of this place. Her feet were bare and bleeding. Her legs cut through their tattered leggings. The shirt she wore was too thin for the cold. She was older, he realised, though it was hard to tell with how dirty she was, and her fixed attention on the ragged bundle she was dragging over the rocks with the last of her strength. Whatever it was, it was too heavy for her, and she was so desperately exhausted. He wished she’d just let it fall.

He limped to her, slipping on the rocks, and realised that he hadn’t imagined the shape of her at all. Her stomach was tight against the thin shirt. She shouldn’t be here. She was going to hurt herself, or the child she carried.

Then he looked down at the rags she was dragging.

“Oh no,” he breathed, staggering back and almost falling from the stone he was standing upon. Daine, breathing raggedly, stooped to catch her breath before crouching to drag the man up onto her shoulders, staggering like a drunkard under his weight. 

“Come on,” he heard her panting. “Don’t you do this to me. Don’t you leave me alone, you brat. You don’t get to promise me you’ll stay and then go like this.”

But Numair, the Numair she was killing herself to save, the ghostlike shape of the body she was dragging, he didn’t answer. He wasn’t dead. He was conscious. His eyes were opened and he breathed, his expression disinterested, his eyes uncaring. He just didn’t answer.

He was letting her die.

He jerked awake with a whisper in his ears, finding Donatien watching him from across the room, hunkered like a bat. Before Numair could verbalise what he’d seen, he found himself murmuring those last words that had followed him out, spoken in Constant’s voice.

“Look to me at the end of your world,” he repeated obediently, unsure if this message was for him or for Don.

Don didn’t seem to hear. “Well?” he asked, watching as Numair rolled over and gagged, sick all the way through as he pictured Daine killing herself to save him. “What did you see?”

“I saw me betraying them,” Numair whispered, rolling into a ball and covering his head to try to hold himself together. He stayed like that until his world stopped spinning and then, slightly, uncurled. Just enough so he could look up at Don, who was smiling tiredly.

“Well then,” said Don, “guess we truly aren’t so different after all.”

Numair didn’t know how he made it home, only that he did. He wanted to crawl into bed with Savigny and have his man hold him in his warmth and banish the impossible cold of the rocky place from Numair’s bones. It felt like cold was all he was, like he’d been given a taste of his future that was as cloying and permanent as death. Now it was all he could feel. 

It had been a mistake, to trust the fearwood, he realised. He’d been a fool. It had been an impulse, spurred by his cursed curiosity and his surety that, now he knew what he was facing, he could fight it off. He’d been wrong. There was no fighting that.

Daine in the rocks. Her skin painted grey. A child?

She’d lose her child, dragging him to safety.

He whimpered in the covers, burrowing down and closing his eyes, scared of falling asleep in case he dreamed of that loss, of that betrayal. How could he do that to her, ignore her pleas? He  _ wouldn’t.  _

Would he?

Somehow, he fell asleep, though it seemed impossible. And he slept solidly, right through the dawn and well into the next day. He woke feeling sick and groggy, like he was hungover. If Savigny had been to bed with him, he wasn’t there now. Numair was still alone. 

He washed. He dressed. He felt dazed and dull. It occurred to him that the fearwood’s effects seemed to worsen with further exposure. He decided to steer clear of it from now on. He limped down to the kitchens, to beg for breakfast, and found the staff playing cards at the great table.

“Did I miss Savigny?” he croaked as they leapt up, looking appalled at the state of him. “And Daine?”

His answer was a startled silence. It was the valet, Ruben, who unfolded from his bench first and spoke. “Did they return last night?” he asked, Numair blinking dully at him. “Their horses aren’t here.”

“They didn’t come to breakfast,” offered the cook. “It went cold on its plates. As did dinner, mind you.”

The maid, voice soft, added, “Lady Daine’s bed hasn’t been slept in, sir. We assumed you knew.”

Numair, shivering, pictured the stony place and Savigny dead upon his family’s crest. He tasted bile. He heard Adel’s screams. 

He said, “Call the guards.”


	33. The Heart of Dark Rose

Numair was not a man who took well to feeling useless. He refused to admit that this was as much of a character flaw as Raoul kept telling him it was.

He’d searched all morning for his missing companions, more annoyed than concerned at first, though that had changed fast as he hadn’t found them. The city guards had circulated without much haste, feeling rather like Savigny had simply decided to sleep out for the night with some lover or other – and Daine, unfortunately, had a reputation for vanishing. They were little help. Come early afternoon, Numair, beginning to panic, had resorted to attracting the attention of George’s spies at Lady Silvain’s estate. They agreed to search, and to reach out to Descartin in case there was more hope of finding them in the Bog.

They’d found nothing.

Now, Numair was curled on a flat lounge, knees tucked and mind working furiously. He’d tried lying supine, but a sudden stomach-ache had pulled him into this strange contortion, trying to control his anxiety by crushing it. He was thinking that the last time he’d seen Daine and Savigny it had been mid-morning the day before. Over twenty-four hours, in fact. To be specific, it had been thirty-four hours. Anything could have happened in thirty-four hours. They weren’t lost, not in the city they knew better than they knew each other’s faces. They might be hurt, but Numair doubted that both of them had been incapacitated at the same time. And they _must_ be together because it didn’t make sense that they’d both vanished separately. Daine had obviously followed Savigny wherever he was going, for whatever reasons she had, and something had gone wrong. Really, there were two options: they were being held somewhere they couldn’t escape, or they were dead.

Was it any wonder that at twenty-seven hours since he’d last sighted them, with Numair making no headway on his own, that he’d gone for help he knew wouldn’t deny him?

“I’ve checked with everyone I know Sav’s close to within the Jewel,” Constant was saying to Pech, who was lying on yet another strange flat lounge – there seemed to be no lack of them in the palace suites – with his head hanging off the end. He watched them, upside-down and with a pipe hanging from his mouth that he was almost chewing the end off. The clicking of his teeth on the bone pipe made Numair wish greatly to strangle him. “None of them have seen him, _or_ Daine. This makes no sense. Where would they go!?”

He was close to tears, even ignoring his dogs. Earnest was pestering for attention but Constant kept ordering him to go heel by the unlit fireplace, where Bon Bon was being furious about her exclusion.

“Have we tried the lower cities?” Pech asked.

“Oh, what an idea!” Numair declared. “I’d completely forgotten that there was a world outside the Jewel! How lucky we are for having such a mind among us.”

Pech looked at Numair, upside-down and with his face reddening from the angle he was at. Numair glared.

“Ignore him,” was Raoul’s calm reply. He was, with Constant, leaning over the map of the city they’d laid out. Constant had been helping mark all the places he knew Savigny haunted, as well as the provinces of the different guardhouses in case they were forced to move from guardhouse to guardhouse to request assistance. “He gets cranky when he’s scared.”

“I’m not scared!” Numair snapped, launching up as a surge of incensed energy drove him. He paced, Earnest skittering out of his path and Bon Bon inching back. “How is this city so useless that it can’t find one pox-ridden noble? Do you pay your guards in beans?”

“Rainary sent a ton of birds to the guardhouses,” Constant said, staring at the map like he could see his brother on it if only he paid it enough attention. “Surely, one of them might …”

“You’ll get little help from the Bog today,” said Pech. Numair turned away, walking to the window to try and calm himself. He couldn’t look at them right now. “They lost a grain store to fire last night, and three temples. You’ll find that most of your Bog guards are down there pulling bodies from the rubble.”

There was a terrible silence.

“No,” said Constant, his tone clipped. Numair kept staring out the window. “They wouldn’t have been near there. Why would they be near a Bog temple? Savigny doesn’t even _have_ a patron god.”

Gripping the sill so tight his fingers were whitening, Numair buckled around another twist of his stomach-ache. He felt weak and shaky. He’d felt like this since the fearwood the night before, the aftereffects giving even small hints of unease the power to rattle him like an earthshake. And this was not a small hint of unease.

The sun set late in the summer. It meant he could see the city with the harsh golden light of sunset. He could see the sprawl and the smoke.

Thirty-four hours.

“The Bog is built to burn,” he said through his gritted teeth. “How far have the fires spread?”

He wrenched a hand from the sill, fingers cramping, and wiped his forehead. Sweat dribbled into his eyes. They were dead. They were hurt. They were burning, like his dream. He felt so ill; he saw, again, Adel’s body curled on the stones of the Jewel.

“We’re missing a very obvious source of information,” said Pech, who had finally sat up when Numair chanced to look around at him. “Who knows the Marquis better than his boy beloved?”

For a moment, Numair was baffled.

Then he realised.

“Don?” he blurted out, earning himself raised eyebrows from all three of them, he assumed because of his familiarity with the king. “Is he in a position to help us? He was barely coherent yesterday.”

“He was at the peace talks today,” said Raoul. “I won’t say that he looked healthy, but he was there. Unfortunately.” At their stares, Numair barely biting back a sarcastic comment that would have Raoul sniping at him again, he gave the concise and supremely unsatisfying explanation that, “It didn’t go well.”

A part of Numair that was calm realised that Don appearing at the talks today was likely a result of what Numair had told him he’d seen in the fearwood, the army of beetles that had marched to swarm Galla, the burning Hartholm estate, Savigny’s body on the wall. That part of him pointed out that Numair crippling himself with anxiety as he battled the terror it had instilled in him had been worth it if it had drawn Don from his rooms.

The rest of him was far too worked up to take heed of this sensible voice.

It was enough to make him want to hide in bed himself. How had Don withstood months, nay, _years_ of this? Numair felt like he was shaking apart from the inside out.

“Be that as it may,” was Pech’s quiet addition to the conversation, “if the Marquis went to the Bog before vanishing, then the king is our best bet to finding him. They spent sixteen years sharing everything. He’ll know all of Savigny’s haunts, and likely Daine’s too.”

Numair heard only one thing from this: the certainty that they were in the Bog, which was on fire.

Whirling away the window, he launched towards the privy room, barely making it through the door before his already empty stomach drove him to his knees. The downside of having little to lose, however, was that what did come up burned his throat and mouth, his whole body quaking at the sensation of dry heaving so violently to expel what wouldn’t be expelled. He was close to tears, on his knees, bile and spit on his chin and his body so weak that he couldn’t even stop himself sliding to the floor and huddling small.

The door clicked.

“Get out,” Numair croaked, his whole body wracked with shivers that drained what little energy he had left. “Leave me be, curse it. Let me have my privacy.”

“What did you do?” Raoul asked. Numair turned his head away, disliking that his friend was seeing him in such a disgusting state. “I’ve never seen you like this. You don’t drink, so it’s not overindulging. Some strange magic, perhaps to find them? Or an illness?”

“No,” Numair managed. Some sanity was returning; the shivers were slowing. This was not the nicest space to be prone in. He loathed the smell of lime, which barely managed to cover the scent of the earth-closet. “It’s unimportant. Ignore me. We need to find them.”

He opened his eyes, finding Raoul stooping to help scoop him from the floor and stand him on his feet. Numair took the hand that was being offered, coming to an unsteady upright position that didn’t feel liable to keep him up for long.

Raoul studied him but didn’t say anything. Instead, he backed out of the narrow space which wasn’t built for two, especially not the height of Numair or bulk of Raoul. Feeling rather like he was leaving his stomach on the earth-closet floor, Numair slunk out after Raoul.

Pech was gone. Constant was silently pouring water from a pitcher into a copper bowl, waiting until Numair had made his tedious way back to his flat lounge before bringing the water to him to wash his hands and face with.

“I’m scared too,” Constant said quietly as Numair dried his hands. “I keep thinking of Adel …”

Numair’s anger drained away. He peered up at Constant’s face, finding that the boy’s eyes were swollen, his mouth tight. The bags under his eyes would rival Numair’s own.

Constant, even quieter, his voice cracking horrendously, whispered, “What if we don’t find them?”

“We will,” said Numair, determined to be certain even though he wasn’t at all. “Cría isn’t that big. Let’s begin again. We’ll sweep the map from north to south, working through each quadrant. Anywhere, absolutely anywhere at all you know Savigny or Daine have spent time, tell us.”

He forced himself up and hobbled to the table with the map. Reluctantly, Constant followed. They didn’t get far, however. There came a knock at the door.

Prepared to be betrayed, Numair was expecting Pech and the king, though he didn’t know why he was so sure the man had gone to fetch him. Therefore, it was a surprise when Captain Rainary and her sister, Nora, entered. Rainary looked exhausted, and her normally crisp uniform showed signs of a hard ride.

“I’ve put the fear of Mithros into every guardhouse in the Jewel,” she said without preamble. “They’ll look now or I’ll know why. Are we certain that it was Daine following Savigny into mischief and not the other way around?”

“You think she might have lost herself in an animal?” asked Constant.

Numair closed his eyes, riding another wave of sick without letting it flatten him.

When he opened them, Nora was watching him closely; Rainary seemed too distracted to have noticed.

“I don’t know,” was her troubled answer. “I can’t think why _else_ she wouldn’t be back. I saw her only a sixday ago and she was happy to have settled back home. She was of no mind to flee.”

“Perhaps your kisses have lost their staying power,” Nora said, stepping around her sister and coming to look at the map. She missed the cold look her sister gave her at her glibness. Numair was surprised to hear they were courting again. Daine hadn’t said.

“It does seem more likely that she’s lost and Sav is looking for her than that he led her into danger,” said Constant.

Numair wasn’t sure if he agreed. Certainly, Sav would never deliberately put Daine into danger. But if he was fulfilling an obligation to Raven, and Daine followed him into it under the guise of learning how Raven was controlling him …

That, Numair could see happening.

“Well, I can’t see a way around it,” declared Nora, straightening up from her examination of the map. “If you’ve picked the Jewel apart, and the inner-city guards are tearing their quarters apart to no avail, then the only place left is the Bog. None of us have ever walked with him there. So, how is the king today?”

Pech returned before Constant and Rainary, who’d gone to get Don, did. He gestured Numair into the sleeping chamber without explanation, telling him to sit upon the bed as he got to work with a basin of heated water and several vials of powder. Numair watched suspiciously.

“My Gift doesn’t take well to mind-altering concoctions,” Numair warned.

“What a terrible way to live your life,” Pech dead panned. He was stirring the powders into the water. “Alas, I’m not that generous. It’s a calming draught. I’ve used it in the past on Donatien, before Ossika and her heavy hands became involved. It’s mild, but it will take the edge off. I suppose she didn’t like that he could still use his brain upon it. Drink it and lay flat. The initial effect can be dizzying.”

Numair decided to trust the man. He didn’t have much choice.

“Don’t talk or try to sit up,” Pech warned as Numair drained the basin, the water tasting of nothing much except cold and perhaps a hint of mint-leaf. “I’ll time it, but you won’t like the feeling if you rush. Now, down.”

Numair obeyed. There was something about Pech being serious that made it difficult to disobey him. He lay flat, closed his eyes, and tried not to think about where Daine and Sav were right now while he was putting his feet up in comfort.

Pech was, for some reason, tapping on Numair’s wrist. One tap every couple of seconds. Numair focused on that, and then time seemed to slip away. An icy sensation washed over him, leaving him sedate in the bed, mind locked on that tapping, until he shivered awake and realised he must have dozed. Pech was lifting his hand away.

“One more minute,” he murmured, setting his fingers against Numair’s pulse in his throat. Numair took note of his body, realising that his heartbeat had settled and the sweat was drying on his skin. He felt dry-mouthed still with a low buzz of frustrated tension that he wasn’t up and out there finding his friends, but it was no longer overwhelming. “A little more …”

The door opened, someone coming in. Numair reacted instinctively, sitting upright.

It wasn’t pleasant.

Whimpering, Numair rolled and pressed his face into the bedding. It felt as though there were sparks firing in the back of his brain, up and down his spinal cord. The hairs on his arms were standing up. It didn’t hurt; it was just supremely unpleasant. On top of that, now he’d started up it, it seemed as though the bed below him was swaying and bucking.

Pech clicked his tongue.

“Well, that’s one way to learn,” he said to Numair, who groaned.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Donatien, Numair managing to roll himself to look at the king when he recognised his voice.

“An inability to listen to instructions,” said Pech without sympathy. “He’ll be upright in a moment, Majesty.”

Don didn’t seem inclined to wait a moment. He strode over to the bed and dumped paperwork upon it in a shower of parchment, Numair gingerly propping himself upright onto his elbow with a minimum of brain jangles punishing him.

“What is this?” Numair asked, squinting at the mass of what looked like property deeds.

“Savigny owns buildings in the Bog,” Don said, Constant hurrying in with his arms wrapped around a large ledger. “It’s been several years since I last audited him personally, so I can’t recall the locations exactly, but it didn’t take long to find where the clerks stored his records.”

Numair looked at the masses of paperwork. He’d bet that for a fief as extensive as Hartholm, this was barely a sliver of what was available.

“You remembered exactly what was needed from rote?” he queried, taking the ledger from Constant and skimming the first few pages.

Don was shuffling through the scrolls, sorting them rapidly into smaller piles.

“I have a very good memory for numbers,” he said distractedly. “A king who knows his finances knows his country.” As he glanced up at Numair, who saw the strained look in his eyes and knew he was nowhere near as salient as he was forcing himself to appear, he added a tight, “I’m sure you can attest to how clarifying terror can be.”

Numair didn’t know if Don was referring to the grim horror Numair had seen in the fearwood the night before, or the terror of being told Savigny and Daine had been missing for thirty-four – thirty-five, now – hours. Either way, Numair understood. After all, he’d run on pure panic after the first twelve too, before the mountain of dead ends he’d been running into had sent him hurtling into an anxiety state.

“I tried to scry them,” he admitted, seeing Don tense – and everyone in the room holding their breath as they stared at the king. “I can see imprecisely, sometimes, if I’m familiar enough with the person I’m looking for. It’s not perfect, though. When I realised I wasn’t finding them, I did my best to scry. That was just before I came here.”

Don sucked in a loud inhale through his teeth. Everyone was so quiet waiting for his reaction.

“What did you see?” he asked, fingers still on the scrolls.

Numair shuddered. A brief surge of panic rushed him, but he rode it out. A distant part of him noticed that Constant was in the room, and the door was shut. That bolstered him. If Constant had learned to manage his battleshock to the point where closed doors no longer sparked it up, then Numair could manage this.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just darkness. Wherever Daine was, it was dark.”

Don whispered, “Savigny?”

Numair hadn’t been able to see anything of Savigny.

He didn’t know how to say this calmly.

Don didn’t seem to need him to say it. He took another breath, this one steadying, and said, “I presume it’s been hours since your first attempt? Then try it again, now. I need to find the property records, and I need to see the years that Daine audited. Constant, find them in the ledger.”

“Why Daine?” Constant asked. Numair didn’t move, stunned that Don had just brazenly asked him to use magic in front of him – though, Pech had no such qualms, and vanished from the bed to grab a mirror from the wall and bring it to Numair.

“I’m certain Savigny has properties he hasn’t reported,” said Don with fixed, faux calm. Numair could see a muscle under his eye working, but he was radiating intense composure. “They’ll likely be familiar haunts for him when he’s in the Bog, which means they’ll have seen him after his last contact with Magisra Numair. Savigny doesn’t have the ability to obscure large purchases without someone noticing, especially as his tax records are notoriously ill-kept. They’re combed over every year. Daine knows how to obscure illicit purchases.”

“ _Daine_ does _not_ ,” exclaimed Rainary, looking appalled. “The Hartholms would have never taught her that!”

“They didn’t,” said Don calmly. “I did.”

There was silence. Raoul, who was lurking by the door, began to grin hugely. No matter how old he got, he still loved mischief. Nora looked appalled. Rainary had an expression as though her entire world had been tipped onto its side and shaken until all the sense fell out.

“You do know that they pay _you_ the taxes, don’t you?” asked Pech in a tone that suggested this was the single thing that had convinced him of Don’s insanity.

Don ignored him.

“Look for a strange redirection of funds,” he instructed Constant. “It won’t be in a large chunk or a singular period. It will be distributed over locations and times, and they’ll be purchases that will make sense to someone unaware of the inner workings of the estate. Numair, are you scrying?”

Numair hadn’t been. He’d been too distracted by His Majesty, King Tax Evasion.

Now, he switched that distraction off. It was difficult one-way scrying, where he had nothing but his own thoughts of the person he was looking for to focus the image onto the surface of the mirror. There were no guarantees of anything. Whatever they were talking about around him now, he blocked it all; his whole mind was locked on Daine. He tried Daine first because, though he was loath to admit it even to himself, failing to scry Savigny earlier had frightened him beyond belief. Darkness or not, at least Daine was _somewhere_.

It was a tedious, exhausting process. Numair hated blind scrying. It made his head ache and failure could be upsetting. It was also a technique where, unlike many others, the actual strength of his Gift made little difference. Black robe or not, he was at the mercy of what the forces that focused the mirror chose to show him.

He was extremely grateful for Pech’s draught, especially now the side-effects had faded. He could have never managed this still reeling from the fearwood.

Finally, the mirrored flickered.

Numair focused harder.

The surface, foggy, indistinct, began to slowly clear. It wasn’t promising, at first. The misty coating that was so fine but so frustratingly impossible to see through that Numair longed to sweep it aside with his hand, it faded enough around the edges for them to see the corners of darkness. Around him, Numair knew people were watching the mirror too, those that weren’t concentrating on the ledger and scrolls. He couldn’t attend to them. He just kept thinking of Daine: her stubborn chin, her shy smile, the way she’d duck her head if he made her blush. Her smoky hair and grey-blue eyes. Her determination to heal. Her kindness. Her hand, pale and damaged and thin, reaching for him in the dark. Horsehair and copper magic; sass and fire; joy, and sadness, and pain, and love.

The mirror cleared.

Numair gasped. He wasn’t the only one.

The image was so close to them it was hard to tell where they were spatially, but Numair could pick up enough contextual clues that he felt woozy with fright all over again. Daine was sitting with her back against a choppy dirt wall, Savigny in her lap with her arm crooked protectively around him. They were coated in dirt and ash and muddy splatters of dried blood. They were coloured strangely, both from the grime and from the only source of light it appeared they had, which was a soft ball of rusty pink mage light that Savigny held loosely upon his softly rising and falling chest. His eyes were shut, his eyelids strange half-moons of dark skin on a face that was otherwise ghostly with ash. His hair was sword blade grey; his clothes were ruined. Numair could see Sav’s magic pooling around them, in a fine, steady shimmer over his whole body when Numair adjusted his eyes to see it, as though Sav was meditating, and then bulging out in a firm ball with them in the centre.

They were underground, Numair realised. They were buried. Savigny was holding the walls up with his Gift.

Numair’s mind began the rapid calculations of how long Savigny could do so with the power Numair knew he had at hand, but he wouldn’t know for sure unless he knew if Sav was injured, unless he knew if Sav had used part of his reserves prior to this, and unless he knew how much weight was upon them bearing down. And then he realised it didn’t matter. Sav would likely hold the walls up until he had drawn the very last spark from his life’s force purely because, if he let go, he and his sister would die. Savigny, Numair knew, had a lot of life to give for his family. But he couldn’t create air, and he was larger than Daine, and he would be the first to yield to the sedative effects of exhaled air. Unable to draw what they needed from air that had already passed through them in the closed ecosystem of the ball of magic, his lungs would starve. As he drew harder and harder on his reserves, he’d require more oxygen to power his body. More than Daine. He’d fall asleep first, the fatal, inexorable sleep of those who were suffocating. And, as soon as he did, his magic would fail. The walls would fall. It would truly become a grave.

He shattered back to life to find that Constant had fled the room, Pech after him. Nora appeared to be turned away from the mirror with horror, until Numair realised that it was Rainary who’d backed away from the sight and hidden her face, with her sister offering what support she could without drawing attention to the fact that Rainary was shaken. Raoul stood by the door, expression grim.

And Don was holding a scroll, his gaze locked on the mirror. He didn’t say anything about what they’d seen, even though he must have been looking.

He simply held up the scroll and said, “Expenses for the Hartholm mews, which Constant says have been inactive since before he can remember. I have my suspicions about which areas of the Bog Savigny may have set up his haunts. I’ll check the dates of large purchases for the mews against the sale of property in those areas and we’ll go immediately.”

“We, Majesty?” Numair croaked, his brain buzzing with the remembered sound of the dream estate burning.

“Sire, no –” Rainary exclaimed, but Donatien spoke again.

This time, his voice was steel.

“I’ll not let them take another loved one from me,” he said icily. “My people won’t recognise me, I’ve been hidden here so long. I’ll be just another city gart. Besides, there are no clean divisions of property in the lowest city. Whatever land may have been parcelled up and sold legally, people build where they please. Once you’re in the area, you’ll need someone familiar to guide you further, and I spent time there too. Captain, you’re to stay here with Constant. This may be a trap to lure him into danger alongside his brother and reduce my consul even further.”

Rainary went to argue, but stopped midway. Numair could tell she was having a vicious battle in her mind. It was madness, to let the king stroll into the slums, but Don wasn’t wrong that this could very well be an attempt to end the Hartholm line in one grim night.

“Is that an order?” she finally asked, voice bland.

“Yes,” said Don. “There’s no one else here I trust with him, especially as I’m certain he’ll try to sneak out after us. Keep Pech with you too. He’s Darragon’s heir, which means they’ll be after him too.”

Rainary grimaced but nodded her concession. There was nothing else she could do. She’d never argue a direct order.

“I’m coming too, then,” declared Nora, Donatien whirling on her. She shook her head at as he went to snap. “Don’t you dare, Biscuit. You don’t get to order me. And someone has to make sure you don’t get mugged for the royal jewels.”

“I’ll be with him,” Numair murmured, not certain he’d earned the disdainful look she gave him.

“As will I,” rumbled Raoul, to Numair’s everlasting relief. Raoul had the effect of making one feel untouchable.

Donatien examined Nora with a strange, lingering look that Numair couldn’t even begin to fathom the meaning behind. She stared back, just as unfathomably. But whatever passed between them, it resulted in this:

“Very well,” said Don, glancing once at the mirror, which was now blank. “What a team we shall make.”

The slums were quiet, eerily so. The empty streets made the haze of grey and red in the air uneasy. Low-lying clouds reflected the glow of the fires back, casting the night sky in an unholy light. The air was potent, thickening in their lungs and making even the robust Raoul breathe heavy. All of this, combined with the silence as people fled the fires or hunkered down in their homes from fear of the furious soldiers roaming, made the Bog like something out of a nightmare, or, Numair thought with a shudder that gutted him, something out of the fearwood.

Donatien, who hadn’t seen his lowest city since he’d still been a prince, was silent and shocked. The rest of them spoke of where they might search, as they had air to, occasionally stopping to glance nervously towards the flicker of fire above the skyline.

Numair listened to Raoul and Nora speak of the fires, falling back slightly so that he and Donatien walked together. Thus far, and likely because they had dressed as inner-city citizens, clean and well-fed, rather than Bog denizens, the guards had left them alone, though they’d been watched. Don had dressed down too, cutting a very strange sight in his battered jerkin and his loose hair roughly hanging around his hollow face.

“Your earrings,” said Donatien without looking at him, Numair fighting an urge to touch the drops that were hidden by his own loose hair. “Do you know where Savigny commissioned them?”

“No,” said Numair. He thought it rather a strange subject to bring up now.

“Herrington Lors, a man from Scanra,” murmured Donatien. “He was kind to us, when we were small. Back then, he was a Bog-poor trinket crafter living in an alley three buildings up from a cathouse. He made pretties from wire and common stones because they were all he could afford. He’d give the children coins to find him bits and pieces he could use, but oh he could make such lovely things from what others threw away. He’d been a jeweller, a proper one, in Scanra, you see, before they fell into the Hungry Years. They’ve been starving for a decade a half now, and economically crippled for even longer. We get many of their refugees who decide to brave the mountain raiders to try for something better here, though most of them end up begging in the Bog without any of the pride they’d have had starving in Scanra. Anyway, he was kind to us for years before he realised who I, and who Savigny, was. Savigny’s fault. He bought him a home that he could ply his trade from, unhappy with the idea that Herrington was a man of great skill reduced to twisting wires for copper bits. Then he ensured that cheap tools and materials would make their way to him. Eventually, Herrington caught on, and confronted Savigny, who declared that he would stop being subtle about it and that there was nothing shameful about receiving money for honourable trade. He commissioned expensive trinkets from Herrington, refusing to purchase them anywhere else, and supplied the fine materials Herrington couldn’t afford with excess left over so the man could make and see his own pieces. Eventually, once Herrington could afford to leave the Bog, Savigny offered to lease a building in the inner city to him if only he’d agree to still sell within the Bog below cost, which Sav swallowed the loss from. I believe there’s a tailor in the Jewel with much the same agreement, and at least one pleasure house buried within the inner city which helps lift women out of the Bog and move them into more preferable work, if they please it. Savigny funds them both, and I’m certain others by now as well. Does any of this surprise you?”

Numair was too astounded to answer. Though it shouldn’t have, it did surprise him. Some part of his mind, though he loved Savigny deeply, had segregated him away with many of the other nobles Numair knew, who were strange nobles, yes, but still _nobles_. They didn’t buy their jewels from the slums or elevate individual beggars above their stations. Though some sought societal-wide change, such as Thayet with her schools, Numair couldn’t imagine them deciding to champion individuals on such small scales. The impact of these actions was simply too small.

Though, he realised, thinking of Daine and Jacoby the horse, he doubted Herrington Lors would call Savigny’s impact small.

“I didn’t think he’d have told you,” said Donatien, hiding a tight smile as he rubbed his sleeve across his mouth. “No doubt he’s still trying desperately to show you his best side, burying everything he thinks is unflattering.”

“I can’t think of anything more flattering than what you’ve just told me,” said Numair softly. Their boots were so loud on the cobbled streets.

“Well, yes, you would say that,” replied Don. “But kindness isn’t how we were raised, and nor were we taught to value the lives of beggars and whores. If Lord Dieudonné had ever discovered what Savigny spent his allowances on, he’d have had us locked into our rooms. And my mother, Goddess forgive. She’d have had us whipped for sure. Well, perhaps not whipped. But she had a cruel mind for punishment. She’d have thought of something twice as canny and even worse. Perhaps she’d would have had Savigny whipped while I watched or something just as awful. The place we’re walking to now, if it still exists, I want you to know that this is Savigny’s best side, no matter how much he’s hidden it from you.”

Numair nodded, not commenting on the dead queen’s cruelty. It wasn’t for him to draw the pain from that barely healed wound, not unless Don wished it.

“How is your head?” he asked softly, masking his voice from Raoul and Nora. Donatien glanced at him, uncertain. “Being back here, in the lowest city, I mean. My impression was you found it fearful. Strain can be devastating to injuries of the mind.”

Donatien looked around the empty streets, his face strangely hued in the second-hand light from the low clouds coupled with the eerie glow of the oil lanterns hung above.

“I thought I did fear it,” he admitted, voice as rough as the patches of unshaven scruff littering his thin face. “But like this, at night and so quiet … it’s more like a memory than a fear. I think I fear the anger and violence of the riots, not the reality of these streets. It’s strange to realise this. Like waking up from a dream I didn’t know I was having until now. It’s like you. I’m so certain that you’re terrifying, until you’re in front of me and I look at you and realise the reality of you is a tall, strange man with a kind face and a cautious voice. I’d have never feared you, if I’d met you before I started losing my mind. In fact, I’m certain I would have liked you tremendously, mage or not. Anyone who would risk the cursed wood to spare another is someone I’d have admired. Even now, I’m sorry we couldn’t be friends.”

“We could,” Numair offered. “I’ve a great need of more friends.”

Don fixed him a tired look.

“Not now we couldn’t,” he said glumly. “I’ve ruined too much, become too devastated a man. I let Adel die, allowed my people to fall into squalor, and now Daine and Sav …”

He trailed off.

When he spoke again, his voice was steadier. “We’re almost there,” he announced so that Raoul and Nora could hear, both looking around. There was little of note around them. “Please, don’t insult our hosts. They’re the best bet we have of knowing where Savigny is, at least that I know of. I can only hope that Sav hasn’t changed his habits too much since I last knew him.”

“Why would we insult our hosts?” asked Raoul, sounding baffled. He added a hasty, “Majesty,” when Don gave him a sideways look, sliding past him and making his way down a dog-legged alley. They followed, without receiving an answer.

At the end of the alley, they found a door. A lantern burning overtop gleamed with red, the fat doctored to change the colour of the flame.

“Ah,” said Raoul, looking at it.

“A brothel?” Nora exclaimed, looking shocked to her core. “I’d heard the rumours, but really? Surely Savigny has _some_ taste. I can’t believe he wastes his coin here when there are people who need –”

“Quiet,” snapped Don. As Nora narrowed her eyes hatefully at him, he knocked.

They waited.

The door opened. The girl who answered it could barely be thirteen, studying them from thickly kohled eyes with her arms crossed in front of her barely covered chest. Raoul had gone still and silent next to Numair, who wasn’t feeling good himself. Nora wasn’t speaking, but the way she was staring at Don didn’t bode well.

Donatien, meeting the girl’s gaze, said, “Is Mademoiselle Perch in?”

“Dunno who you’re –” the girl began, swinging the door closer shut as she set her heel against the far side, as though to stop them shoving past if they had a whim. Not that she’d be able to stop them, Numair thought unhappy. She was as big as a sneeze.

“Lady Silver,” said Don, even quieter. “I wish to speak to her. Does she not still run the Dark Rose?”

The girl, stiller now, said a startled, “Aye,” and looked him up and down before adding, “Who’s to see her, then?”

Don said only, “Abeille,” and the girl vanished, closing the door solidly behind her. They were left standing in the alley, lit only by the gory skies above and the burn of the red lamp.

“Abeille?” said Nora in a teasing voice that was one notch below mocking. “Is that you, prince? What a ridiculous use name.” She glanced to Numair and Raoul, mouth curled into a smile as she said, “It’s old Gallan for _bee_. Our Prince Bee, king of honey bugs and only half as useful. Is that the name you and Savigny came up with when you came creeping down here to spend your coin on buying girls to use as women?”

Numair realised that behind Nora’s eyes was rage. She’d taken the sight of the girl and was sharpening it with her mind, ready to slash the king with.

“It’s a childhood nickname,” said Donatien mildly, not rising to her spite.

“It’s ill-fitting,” snarled Nora. “Bees only sting when incensed. They cause little harm. _You_ , my king, are nothing _but_ harm. How dare you take such a precious name when coming here to be depraved –”

“He didn’t,” came a mild voice. Nora wheeled around, Numair looked to the door and realising a woman now stood there, cocked against the doorframe as she examined Donatien with a critical eye. “I gave him his name. The bee, after all, is the rose’s greatest lover.”

Don went white in the garish light of the red lantern.

“It’s been a long time since our namesake has danced with us, however,” continued the woman, shifting her attention to each of them in turn. Numair felt thoroughly undressed by that gaze, which was beyond sexual interest and right down to his soul, as though she was assessing his very purpose in this world, let alone at her doorstep. “So what brings Abeille here without his Dark Rose?”

Don spoke clumsily at first, stammering, “He –” before coming to an uncertain stop. Nora went to speak but Don slashed a look at her that was all ice and panic, silencing her. Finally, he calmed his tongue enough to manage it: “She’s missing, Mademoiselle. We’ve not seen her or Thorn for almost two days, and a mage scried them in terrible danger. I’m desperate, please – for all she’s done for you, please help us find her.”

Nora tilted her head. Raoul shot Numair a quizzical look.

Numair watched Donatien carefully.

“Well,” said the woman softly, “the world is a strange place. Here I am, dressed in my nightgown, and a king comes to beg me my help. I’m shocked he doesn’t bring guards to smash down my doors and scare my girls.”

“I would never –” stammered Don.

“My Abeille would never,” snapped the woman. “You? I don’t know you. I’ve no reason to believe you’re still my sweet boy, though you’ve his same eyes.” She stopped, something strange twisting into her expression as she stared hard at Don, who trembled. “Goddess forgive, I’d forgotten your eyes. Butter wouldn’t melt. You realise you’ve no friends within these walls anymore, boy? Soft hearts have hardened since you last walked here.”

“I understand,” rasped Donatien. “I swear, I’m here for the safety of those I love. Please, don’t punish them because I’m vile.”

The woman stepped back, gesturing them in. Don hesitated so long that he was last to enter, following close on Numair’s heels. Numair, therefore, was close enough that he heard what the woman said to him as they entered.

“Vile?” she said softly to the king as he passed, Donatien pausing to look at her. “No, I don’t think so. I’ve always said you were lost, not cruel. I hope you prove me right. We’ve no space here for hateful kings.”

Don, swallowed loudly, and whispered, “What about old friends?

Numair didn’t hear her answer, but he had hope.

They left the halls to enter a room which had the feeling of a comfortable space rapidly vacated. Goblets of drink and scattered cushions still littered the room and the chair that Numair took was still warm when he touched the polished arm. It wasn’t the kind of space he’d expected in what was definitely a brothel, with nothing in here designed to titillate or seduce. The woman, who’d introduced herself as Mademoiselle Perch – Lady Silver, she’d smiled, had been her _before_ name, though she hadn’t explained before what – must have seen him looking.

“This is a home before it’s a business,” she said brusquely, sending the girl who’d trailed after them to get them drinks. “I presume since Abeille brought you here that you’re trustworthy. Did he tell you the purpose of this building?”

“There wasn’t time,” said Don, who was seated as awkwardly as could possibly be on the very edge of his chair. “We scried Sav –”

“No names,” hissed Mademoiselle. “You know better. I’ve a house of ears and no desire for them to know I’m entertaining nobility. You’ll betray her.”

Don nodded, guilt crossing his features. None of the others spoke. They didn’t know the language of this place.

“We scried Dark in danger,” he muttered miserably. “She’s underground, they both are. Buried alive with only Dark’s magic protecting them. If you don’t know where she was tonight, we need to move on.”

Mademoiselle looked thoughtful.

“I’ve sent for a runner,” she said, finding her own seat and gesturing for Nora, who was lingering uncomfortably by the door, to come sit by her. “There’s nothing to be done until they get here, since they’ll know cannier ears than mine for finding lost souls. Underground, though … the tunnels are Raven’s swooping grounds.”

Don gritted his teeth. “If she’s hurt them …” he said in a low, coiling voice.

A boy – younger, even, than the girl had been, to Numair’s despair and Nora’s disgust – came in with a tray holding a battered teapot and various implements for serving. He passed it to Mademoiselle and, after a curious glance at them, left. Mademoiselle began to serve them tea, before speaking again.

“We don’t see much of Dark these days,” she said conversationally as she poured. “She is, of course, for those who don’t know, the owner of our building. We were once nothing but a two-bit dancing hall, and rather a salacious one. Held up by men’s lusts, barely. Then, one day, this snippet of a child shows up and demands we teach her to dance. I knew she was noble the moment I spotted her, of course. It’s the way they speak. Oh, she was, perhaps twelve? Maybe younger, even. She wouldn’t tell and she’s always been a tall, haughty thing. I knew she’d come to grief, being so pretty and alone strutting about the Bog with her peacock tail on full show. So, I told my girls to teach her what she wanted and paid my boys to make sure she always made it back to the gates safely. She was talented, anyway. Once she hit passably sixteen and really took to learning how to mask herself with paints, she’d dance for us sometimes. Men adored her, though I never let them touch. Dark – we’d named her by that point, since it seemed she wasn’t going anywhere – she didn’t know herself and I wasn’t willing to let her figure it out on the end of some mercenary’s spear, even if there was no fear of her coming out of it with a bellyful of regret. Noble brats are always so enticed by common kisses. Anyway, time passed, Dark grew up, and Galla changed too. She saw the worst of it, coming here, I think. Worse than her pretty home in the Jewel. That one, now –” She gestured to Don, who was jiggling with anxiety as he stared down into his drink. “– he saw it too, for what good it did us in the end. How old were you when Dark started bringing you here, boy?”

“She didn’t,” said Don into his cup. “I followed her. I was nine.”

“That you were,” said Mademoiselle softly. “It wasn’t until you were well past that that we made you for who you were though, you and Dark both. It was the girl, Dark’s little Thorn, that was what did it. Everyone knew about the strange wild girl living up at the palace, and then suddenly you both show up with this twitchy creature trailing after. Oh yes, I realised fast just how much trouble we’d been courting with you lot. But we didn’t turn you away, as certain as we were that you’d bring trouble. We figured maybe it was good for you, to know your people. Fancy my surprise when Dark inherits and shows up here, half-strung out of her mind with grief, all alone with no bee buzzing around her, and says she’s buying this place and setting it up with money to make it a home. You see, all of you sitting here because our Dark’s in danger, she’d seen everything this place had go wrong over the years – all the children forced on their backs for coin, all the beatings, all the murders, the men turned away from the Mother’s temples because their wives or husbands were beating them but the Mother only cared for ladies, the women who weren’t clean enough to seek shelter there – and she’d decided she was going to make somewhere for them to go, somewhere safe. Somewhere the Mother couldn’t find them wanting through her temple’s judgemental eyes. And she did. She used her grief to build this place, somewhere people can go when they’ve nowhere else. She knew us.”

Nora wasn’t glaring at Don anymore; now she was staring at Mademoiselle. Don was still staring at his cup and looking like he was coming off a night with Pech’s best offerings. Raoul was the only one who seemed calm, though Numair couldn’t fathom how. Every time the woman’s voice lapsed, he was reminded once more that, somewhere, Daine and Savigny could be suffocating. He wanted to scream with the frustration of that.

“Why Thorn?” was what he asked instead of screaming, knowing that if he alienated this woman by demanding she move them faster towards finding their missing friends that they’d lose a valuable lead.

“As a name?” queried Mademoiselle, smiling at least. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? She’s always been the fiercest of them. And by that point we were understandably eager to obscure their true names.”

Numair, if he’d been feeling calmer, would have smiled at that. It was true. Daine was the most liable to bite.

“In the end, knowing us didn’t seem to stay with you, though,” said Mademoiselle to Don, who winced. “You still abandoned us. Dark never did. I suppose I should have seen it coming when you left her for us to put back together following her parents’ murders, hiding from her sadness up on your mountain perch.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Don whispered. “It was just … I didn’t know what to do, and she was suddenly so different.”

“Four years is an eon when one is twenty and the other sixteen, I suppose,” said Mademoiselle with a shrug. “Dark went from child to lord overnight, leaving you behind. But you never caught up, did you? You still come here with a child’s plea for help, certain that our fondness for a lost boy will mean we’ll help your cause now even though the man who stepped into that boy’s shoes has been starving us for years.”

Don was frozen. So was Numair. The atmosphere of the room had chilled without warning.

“You’re a man now,” said the woman, setting her cup aside and settling herself more comfortably into her chair as she examined Don with bland distaste. “Look at you, all grown up. You look as though you’ve had a hard week. Little sleep. Perhaps you’ve been here, as I know Dark has been, fighting to counter the ripple effects of the Darragon lord’s murder.”

Don twitched, but it was Raoul who spoke. His deep voice was shocking after so long of him silent.

“Seeking the killers?” he asked.

“No,” said the woman shortly. “What care do we have for the murderer of nobles? They’ve a whole system to avenge them. She’s been here cleaning up after the hateful attacks on mages by those driven to panic by a lord killed so publicly, helping redirect the vengeful tirades of guards with no sensible master who now feel free to kick where they please in the name of a broken law. She’s been here helping ferry food across locked walls, or did you not see on your easy way through that the city gates have been closed to us?”

They had seen. It had been Raoul and Nora who’d gotten them through the locked gates, with Raoul’s diplomatic documents and Nora’s recognisable name.

“Or perhaps you’ve been up on your mountain, blind to our suffering,” was the cold finish to her fury. “I’ve four dead from this house alone this week. One to the fires last night. One to the tunnels trying to bring food to us. Two to slavers, probably alive but as good as dead to the infant they’ve left behind without a single parent left to hold her. Do you see us now, my boy?”

Don managed a weak, “I didn’t know. I was ill. I’m sorry.”

“You were ill,” said Mademoiselle with a thin smile. “We were dying. A bad week indeed.”

A knock came at the door, the woman rising to answer it. A different boy slipped through, handing her a tightly rolled parchment before leaving. She unrolled it and read while Don hunched down into his chair, looking as bad as Numair was certain he had earlier, while sick on the earth-closet floor.

“I’ve a whisper of where Dark might be,” said Mademoiselle finally, rolling the parchment back up and holding it close as she turned back to them. Numair jolted upright, but Don barely moved. “I thought it might be so. You’ll all have to wait here. The one who might know is no friend of the king’s, and she’s got a very good eye for faces – even ones that have been hiding from us for the last six years.”

Don covered his face with his hands.

“Don’t look so mournful,” said the woman, glancing at him. “Nothing I’ve said has implied for a minute I’m going to let those two die, if I can possibly help it. You forget something, little bee.”

She walked to him, waiting until he’d uncovered his face to look at her before speaking again, softly as though just for him – though they all heard it.

She said, with great pride and devastating sadness, “She was our Gift long before she was ever yours.”


	34. Honey and the Bee

Simmering in a stew of his prodigious discontent, it was no wonder that no one dared approach the corner where Numair sulked. Not even Raoul wanted to deal with him right now. Numair was left on his own with nothing to do but think up increasingly terrible outcomes for his missing companions. The only thing breaking the frightful monotony of this was the scant moments he could catch Raoul’s gaze and scowl fiercely at him, letting Raoul know just how displeased Numair was that Raoul had stuck him over here until, in Raoul’s words, Numair “stopped being such a dragon’s arse”.

Numair thought scathing things about his friend. It didn’t cheer him up.

They were waiting for Mademoiselle to return from where the runner had taken her. Though it had barely been an hour since she had left, every minute gone was another blow against Numair’s already thin patience. At first, Raoul had done his best to distract them from the anxiety of being stationary when their companions could be dying; quickly, as Don and Nora had devolved into bickering and Numair’s already low mood had soured, he’d given up on this and removed himself from their sharp tongues and acid wits. Now, he lingered by the doorway, examining the joints of the door frames and testing the walls. Numair didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t care.

He covered his eyes and tried not to picture Savigny’s magic failing.

“What I don’t understand,” Nora declared, taking a quick detour from her verbally savaging Don for his ineptitude, “is why the woman kept referring to Savigny as ‘she’. Especially if he was here so young, surely they must know he’s no gissy, even with all his airs and graces. I mean, I _have_ to assume at least one of them got into his tight pants, considering this is a brothel and he’s an outrageous flirt. Or, rather, his skirt.”

Her smirk shot Numair’s temper from simmering to boiling over, and he uncovered his face with a snarled retort dying on his lips as Raoul appeared beside him and clamped a heavy hand onto his shoulder.

“Easy, soldier,” murmured Raoul.

“Why else was he coming here if not for some flirt and pretty?” Nora began, having not goaded a response from Don. Numair, of course, barely seemed to exist to her; she hadn’t noticed that her barbs were catching him too. “I don’t believe for a moment all that dross about him been some kind of benefactor –”

“Does it make you feel good, to lash out?” Don asked quietly, the first time he’d spoken in some time. Nora went silent, giving him a startled look. “Have you ever considered that it doesn’t matter if what you say is correct if no one can stand you long enough to listen to you say it?”

“Oh, look at this, the boy king does have a voice,” Nora hissed back, fixing him with a look designed to sear the most confident to their bones. Don met it with uncharacteristic immovability, his hands over his knees curling into white-knuckled fists. “If only he’d learned to use it four years ago, instead of cowering in his bedroom letting others rule his king –”

“No, stop it,” Don snapped. He stood up and turned his back on her, stiff armed and furious. “I’ve had enough. Peck at me all you want, later. I’ll give you ample opportunity since you love it so. But you’ll take back the poison you were spitting about Savigny. He is your Marquis, a lord of Hartholm Fief, and he has done _nothing_ to deserve your ire. You’re so certain your people need softness and hope – well Savigny is your _ally_ , you foolish …”

He stammered for a moment and then trailed off, his ears reddening.

They all looked at him.

“Trollop?” suggested Nora. Now, they looked at her, Raoul making a very strange noise. She was … smiling? “Is that the word you’re looking for?”

Don winced.

“Oh bless the boy king,” she said, though the spite was gone from her voice leaving behind only wry amusement. “You can’t think of a single insult, can you? I never knew, you’re _polite._ Fancy that. Savigny’s got a mouth dirty enough a mother couldn’t love it and here’s you blushing because you’re embarrassed to even think a nasty word.”

“Savigny doesn’t have a dirty mouth,” muttered Don, rubbing his face like he could obscure the blush with his hand.

Numair cleared his throat, shifting uncomfortably. This earned him a gleeful look from Nora and a sour one from Don. There was no turning around to see the look on Raoul’s face; Numair didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

“Magisra Numair seems to disagree,” said Nora placidly, settling back into her chair with a cat’s smugness. “Seeing as how he’s undoubtably the current target for Savigny’s loving ditties, I’m certain he knows best. Perhaps my _Marquis_ never liked to show you the filthy side to his tongue.”

“Numair,” rumbled Raoul.

Numair ignored him.

“Leave off,” snapped Don. “All Savigny does here, all he has _ever_ done, is fight to fill the gaps our gods leave. Isn’t that what you want, Alianora?”

“I want you to stop abandoning your people,” she shot back, but he was ready and he rose spectacularly to her goad.

“I am one of those gaps!” he roared, Numair reeling. He’d never imagined Don could shout, but shout he had, launching up onto his feet and flinging his arms wide as though to gesture at all of himself. “Look at me, baker’s daughter! Look with your _eyes_ , curse it, not your hate. I am the culmination of twenty generations of divine right to rule, poured into one half-mad man. I hear voices, I see plots, and I’m afraid of the dark. I bleed and I _cry_ and I am _scared._ My very existence is a mockery of the people! Nothing about me qualifies me to rule a schoolhouse, let alone a kingdom. But the gods have _decided_ that my blood makes me king, that my birthright alone means I am divinely given. This is a _gap_. I can’t be the king anybody needs – and _this_ is why the people are abandoned. If I were twenty years older, if I had inherited later, if I had a whole mind, if Savigny was king in my place … maybe. Maybe then we’d be better. But we aren’t, and this isn’t what I wanted either. So the kingdom slides, and all our people fall into those god-made gaps, not just the ones we’re content to see fall, and don’t think for a moment those people haven’t always existed. My mother was a good queen. A steady queen, if fierce and often cruel. Under her reign, we prospered. Yet, still, this place existed. Men suffered violence with no recourse because the Mother doesn’t care for their vulnerability. What of the people who fall outside of the Mother’s parameters, those that had no patron to protect them? Those who fall outside your set perceptions of gart or gis? And what of those who aren’t human at all? Animals were beaten, enslaved, murdered – because no animal god has the power to challenge the human ones, and the human gods are as self-centred as their mortal children. They are tools, never valued, always voiceless – just like the men and children and women of the Bog, of the inner city. Just _tools_.”

Breathing heavily, face flushed white and pink in odd places, he stopped and looked down at himself.

“Just tools,” he repeated softly, eyes closing and his whole body seeming to sway in place. “Who cares to stop the tools from falling into those gaps? No one. Especially not the gods.”

“I care,” said Numair quietly.

Don looked up, fixing Numair with a stare that was startled, thoughtful, curious. They watched each other warily, neither sure of the other. It felt like a moment that was fixed; something was happening that wouldn’t be undone.

It felt, Numair realised, like when Daine had reached out to him.

They were forging something.

“I thought we’d fill those gaps, before all of this,” Don said to him, his exhausted eyes never leaving Numair’s face. “Savigny and I, we whispered of how we’d do it. How expertly we’d lift our friends from the Bog. Oh, we were so certain – when we were done, we decided, there wouldn’t even be a need for a Bog at all. Riches for all, not just the worthy. We’d marry, the two of us, and Savigny would be the People’s King, born noble but raised to love in the darkest corners of our city. They’d recognise him and love him and follow him wherever he desired to lift them. And I, I’ve never been good with people. I would be free, Daine and I, to fight for those who didn’t have voices at all. The horses we whip and the cats we kick, the livestock we harm, the wildlife we drive from their homes. I knew I couldn’t be the king the people needed – I just felt so overwhelmed, so consumed by the human suffering I saw here – but I could certainly fight for the People, as Daine called them. And I was so sure that this _was_ why the gods gifted me my divine right to rule. Why else would they have sent me Daine? But then it all fell apart and here I am, standing alone in the wreckage of the world. The gods might be real, but they’re selfish, mercurial creatures, deserving of as much love or compassion as a king. Peel them apart and they’re rotten, all the way through …”

“Just like a king,” was Nora’s soft comment, Numair’s heart twinging at the defeat on Don’s face when he nodded.

“Don’t speak ill of Savigny,” was Don’s final comment, finally looking away from Numair as though he couldn’t bear it any longer. “He’s done more than I ever have, and he did it without ever praying to a single god.”

Silence settled in the room. Numair knew from the way Raoul was standing, stiff and shocked, that there was going to be words had there as soon as his friend had him alone. He was glad the man had been here to see this, however; no matter how many reports Numair wrote, nothing more could have encapsulated the maelstrom that was Galla more than its king’s tirade.

“It’s not too late,” said Nora. She sounded odd. Numair almost wasn’t listening; he’d turned to look at Raoul as Raoul had tugged on his sleeve. “Maybe Savigny was the king you wanted beside you, when you were children. But you’re grown now, Biscuit. You know better.”

Agreeably, Don murmured, “And if not a king for the people, why not a queen?”

“Why not,” agreed Nora.

Raoul, who was trying to communicate with just his eyes with Numair, froze. Moments later, Numair did. He felt like he’d run full force into a vast brick wall he’d never for a moment seen coming. It seemed as though Raoul was feeling quite the same, judging from his white-eyed panic. Surely though, Numair thought, _surely_ they’d misheard.

“Kalasin of Conté –” Raoul began, rousing himself into deciding to play politics while Numair gaped.

Don didn’t even turn to look at them. “Is nine years old,” came his voice, calmer than Numair had ever heard it. “Whatever you all may have thought of me coming to this place, I will _not_ buy my kingdom’s sanctuary on the back of a bartered child. You insult me by even offering it, Tortall, just like your snake-tongued noble did earlier today.”

Raoul narrowed his eyes, just briefly. His brain was visibly grinding. Numair knew that Raoul had little taste for this, certainly not enough to feel sure of his footing.

“Then you’ll take a Maren bride,” he said against all evidence to the contrary, judging from the cat-smug contentment on Nora’s face and the fierce, brilliant blaze of surety that had stiffened Donatien’s spine and taken him from bowed man to certain king.

Now, Don turned, his mouth open to respond –

– and his gaze skipped straight past them, landing somewhere at ground level with a slow, startled blink of his eyes. There was a beat where they kept waiting for a response that wasn’t going to come, before Numair turned to look too.

A door had been shoved open, wobbly on a broken lock, and someone had entered. This person hadn’t knocked to alert them of their presence, but Numair was willing to forgive such a small indiscretion from a person who didn’t appear quite ready to grasp the finer points of politics anyway. This person gazed at them, dirty from the grimy floors of the building and looking small and neglected, small face creased into a great frown.

“Where did that come from?” Raoul said, stepping around as though to get a better look at some dangerous creature.

“Who are you?” asked Don, crouching to bring himself to ground level.

Nora and Numair, similar in both their surprise and their unease with infants, said nothing.

The baby took one look at the collection of companions she’d discovered in her adventuring and made a decision to go to the one who looked the most easily charmed. She was wrong in this decision, Numair thought, feeling slighted as she scrambled past quickly in the ungainly stage of crawling that involved every undeveloped joint the body possessed. He was _obviously_ the softest touch there. Instead, she scooted right into Don’s arms, who made a soft sound of comfort and lifted her into a hold that was as practised as if he hauled babies every day. She was a tiny thing, made of legs too skinny for something so young and stick-like arms that clutched at whoever was willing to cosset her. Numair looked at her barely-chubby face and those huge, worried brown eyes set into them, and he hurt. If they were to scrub her of the grime, and then to continue scrubbing through the second layer of grime that would unearth, he suspected she’d be a mot the same shade or slightly lighter than Savigny, with hair just as dark with tighter, rougher curls.

“You’re dirty,” said Don in a low-lilted whisper to the baby, fetching her out to arm’s length and frowning at her ill-fitted and grimy clothes, before tipping her – she squalled, half amused, half outraged – to glance at the state of her pants. Numair didn’t need to look to know. He had a nose. “Where are your parents, then, little one?”

“Gone,” was the blunt answer. Mademoiselle was back, walking in and spotting the child instantly. “Slavers took the mother and the gart who was as good as her da. The real da, who knows where he is, and there’s no finding him. She’s the Dark Rose’s bastard now. The young ones were supposed to be caring for her, but they’ve no mind for babies. Hern, go get whoever was rostered to care for Honey. They’re in for boxed ears at the state of her.”

The boy behind her scuttled off.

Don hadn’t even looked away from the girl he was holding, bringing her close to his chest with one arm as she began to cry with soft, weary sobs. They were hoarse. It sounded as though she no longer expected anyone to take heed of her whimpers, which was a state of affairs set to ruin Numair’s heart. He took a step forward, pulled by that need, though stalled by the realisation that he didn’t know what to do for such a small human.

She gave a hollow, rasping wail.

“Give her here,” Mademoiselle said with a sigh, reaching out. “I’ll get one of the boys to feed her. We’ve got some milk here, somewhere.”

“No,” said Don, his voice strange. “I’ve got her.” And, again, to the girl, who quietened briefly and blinked up at him with thick lashes that were ridiculous on one so little, he whispered, “I’ve got you.”

“Her name is Miel,” said Mademoiselle, watching Donatien with the sharp knowledge of someone who’d known him since _he_ was barely out of toddling. If Numair had thought something was being forged before, that was nothing to the feeling in the air right now. “Miel Estellesri. We’ve taken to calling her Honey, since she’s sweet enough and those that had her aren’t coming back to complain. Her parents are alive, but they’ll never be found. Not now Maren has swallowed them.”

“The cost of slaving is measured in lives, not gold,” Raoul added, which was the most Raoul he’d been all day, Numair realised. It was what he thought, not what he thought needed to be said for the hope of this treaty. Or perhaps he’d realised a Tortall match was lost, and he was hammering in the price of Maren. Pushing Donatien to what, though? A marriage to a baker’s daughter?

Surely not, thought Numair.

Then he looked at the way Nora was looking at Donatien, and the way Donatien was looking at the little Miel, and he reconsidered.

“Who taught you to hold babies?” Nora asked Don with none of her usual spite lacing her words to him. Just curiosity.

“No one,” said Don, who was attempting to tidy the babe’s hair out of her eyes, though he was hampered by her determination to obtain one of his fingers and thrust it into her mouth. “She’s not so different from a lamb, and I’ve held plenty of those. Is that her milk? Give it to me.”

The boy brought the milk, Don retreating to his seat to fix the bottle so he could feed it to her careful. Numair and Raoul lingered, exceptionally useless right now. Nora, after a brief hesitation, went and sat next to him.

“Show me,” Numair heard her ask him.

But that was all he heard; a hand brushed his arm, not Raoul this time, and he turned to find Mademoiselle gesturing him out of the room. Raoul she waved back with a hand, which he frowned at, and so Numair followed her alone.

In the room Numair was taken to, the woman from the Bottle, Raven’s hideout, was pacing. Numair sought desperately for her name before finding it: Remy. Descartin lounged against a wall.

“I should let your noble brats burn,” Remy snarled, spinning on Numair with rage in her eyes. “I don’t _appreciate_ gold coated knobs like Savigny de _Fuckholm_ skulking around _my_ territory!”

Numair blinked.

“Pretty nickname,” he commented, finding his own wall to prop up. His feet hurt. “Where are they?”

Remy snarled, launching herself around the room like a cat set loose in a cage of foxes. Numair could practically see her hackles up. Mademoiselle said nothing. “Do you have any idea how many people we lost last night? Someone set us up. I’ve not heard from half my people, we’ve heard nothing from Raven – and now you come here expecting me to care because one pox-ridden noble decided to stick his beak where it wasn’t welcome and got it blown off?”

“Answer me,” said Numair quietly. He didn’t shout. He didn’t snarl. He didn’t pace.

But he let a flicker of his Gift show around his fingers.

Just a flicker.

Remy stopped pacing, staring at Numair with her nostrils flaring, eyes white-rimmed. Her glasses were broken, Numair noticed. A rough bandage under her shirt showed at the nape of her collar. There was blood and dirt and ash on her skin. She smelled of cooked meat and blood.

“It was supposed to quell the nasty they were spitting up,” said Remy finally, slim shoulders slumping. “An easy operation. Those Yahzed bastards, they were out after last week calling for every mage to be marked to find the noble’s killer. Pointing their fingers at whoever they thought was a mage in disguise. They got people _killed,_ knifed in the street or mobbed just for existing. They got people down the Dirgeway so worked up that they set upon a mage-marked soldier, with cobblestones. Cobblestones! It only takes one to decide to chuck a cobblestone and suddenly every street’s a weapon. The soldiers came back with _horses_ and ran them down. We needed them to shut up before we ended up with barricaded streets and martial law. So we set up to burn their pox-shitting rathole temples. See how nasty they can be with nowhere to be nasty from.”

Numair felt as though he’d been dipped into ice-water, numb from the neck down. His brain was chugging too. He didn’t like where this was going.

“It was supposed to be _easy_ ,” Remy moaned. “We picked the meanest ones, the ones we’re certain have slavers at their core. Figured we could check at the same time and see if we could pull our people out before they end up on the road to Maren. We’d no idea they had things to go boom in their cellars!”

Numair swore, his imagination doing the rest.

“Where _are_ they?” he repeated when Remy turned her attention back to him.

“I saw them sneaking in as we were setting the fires,” said Remy. “Told them to get out and chewed that noble brat out for daring to get involved – don’t look at me like that, Perch, he might be _yours_ and Raven might think he’s tame, but I don’t want an inch of him – but then the whole thing went up. I was too busy trying to get out after that. I don’t know what happened to them. Likely they’re as dead as the rest of my people, since there’s nothing but rubble and blood left of that temple, and the districts surrounding it.”

She looked away, uneasy in the silence.

“I’m sorry,” she added, sounding not.

“What went boom?” asked Mademoiselle, Remy shrugging tiredly.

Numair thought of Adel; he shuddered as he realised he might know.

“I scried them underground,” he told Remy, who fixed him with an uncaring stare. Despite this, he charged on: “They might still be alive, if they dropped into the underground and Savigny sheltered them. I need to be taken down there.”

“I’ve people to attend to –” Remy snapped.

“I’ll take you,” said Mademoiselle, cutting her off. “If one murdered noble is already setting the city to burn, imagine what two will do? If someone gets to digging there and finds Savigny de Hartholm dead, what do you think the soldiers will do to us then, rebel?”

Under the ash, Remy paled.

“The tunnels will be blocked by whatever fell down there with them,” Descartin said idly, speaking for the first time as though he neither knew Numair nor cared about the outcome of this conversation. “There may be injured or dead, or more fires, or the potential for something else to go up. It will be dangerous.”

“Volunteers only, then,” said Mademoiselle.

“How many would risk their lives for one bag?” sneered Remy.

Numair thought of Don’s stories, of this place, of Savigny’s immeasurable impact even though he’d only ever sought to improve lives in small, measurable ways.

And he said, “I think you’d be surprised.”

Raoul refused to let Numair walk under the earth alone, which Numair supposed he wasn’t surprised by. Raoul, in all the time Numair had known him, had never let his friends go alone into the dark when he could help it. Neither, come to think of it, had Alanna. Perhaps they taught them not to do it in knight school.

Numair and Don had a polite disagreement over whether Don would come, which ended with them compromising by Don coming. Numair still wasn’t certain how he’d lost that argument, but lost it spectacularly he had.

Don, somehow, had won the same argument with Nora. How he’d won that one was clearer.

“She has no one,” he’d said of the baby he was still holding, who was moderately cleaner now and much better fed. “The adults of the house are busy fighting fires, and her parents are gone. I won’t leave her here.”

Nora, in the end, had taken the baby back to the Jewel. A single life pulled away from the gap. Numair hoped they found Savigny so he could tell him about it; it seemed like something Savigny would take great pride in.

They walked through darkened streets that had emptied rapidly the closer they got to the blazes. Forgotten barricades made of furniture and the gutted buildings loomed, shattered and abandoned, placed down in the wake of the unrest over the past week and left when the city had gone up in flames. It grew warmer as they came closer to the epicentre too, and they began to pass people who’d fallen and been left to die wherever they’d landed.

Soon, they came to the outskirts of the explosion.

The Bog in front of them had been flattened. Numair couldn’t see how Remy, how _any_ of them had survived. Buildings had been ripped up and thrown back down. It was possible to look across the wreckage and see the blaze that burned across the other side, where it had managed to grab hold of those few buildings left standing and greedily gulp down as much of the city as it could. Numair, with Don and Mademoiselle Perch and Raoul and the twelve volunteers they’d raised in such a short period of time, looked across a battleground made of people’s homes, and knew that the dead who were buried here would likely never all be found.

“We’ll go under here,” said Mademoiselle quietly. Across the destruction, shouts and screams floated from those who battled the fires. Here was quiet enough. This area had already been lost. “Any closer above ground and we’ll get swept up in that. Then we keep going due east according to the rebel’s instructions until we find rubble. Anyone want to back out yet?”

No one did.

“You twelve,” Numair said, turning to their volunteers. He could hear small cries from within the wreckage of the homes. “No one is looking for survivors here and they should be. There’s life under these buildings.”

“But Dark –” one of them protested.

“I’m going to be magically clearing the tunnels,” Numair said firmly, feeling Mademoiselle’s pleased gaze on him. “I’ve got Sir Raoul to help if I need physical force. I’m not saying we don’t need you all, but I am saying there are people up here who need you more. Please.”

He spoke mildly, knowing Don was watching him with something unfathomable in his eyes, knowing that these weren’t his people, knowing he had no right to demand any of them.

Yet, when they found the cover to the sewers and climbed down below into the depths of the city, it was with just the three of them. The other twelve, plus Mademoiselle, they left behind to do the best they could aboveground. And they ended this as they started, the unlikeliest men in Galla facing insurmountable odds.

There was no time underground, no sun to fail to shine upon them through red-tinged clouds. Nevertheless, Numair knew it took the rest of that night and well into the next morning to slowly make their way through the rubble-filled sewers. He had to be careful every time he moved anything to ensure he wasn’t bringing down more rubble atop them, testing everything to make sure he wasn’t crushing survivors within. The whole time, he kept his Gift scanning for the familiar touch of Savigny or Daine, knowing deep in his battered heart that the only way he’d find them was if they were actively using their magic. If they weren’t …

Well, they had to be.

It was because he was taking such close care with his surroundings that he found it, testing down with his Gift and realising that the building that had exploded had dropped down further than any of them had expected. The city had fallen into the hole it had left, obscuring what had been done.

“What’s under the sewers?” he asked, his voice rattling. He coughed, realising it had been hours since he’d spoken, since he’d paid any attention at all to his companions, who helped where they could to mark passages and walls and keep him standing.

“Nothing, I don’t think,” said Don, his voice also hoarse. They were all hungry and thirsty. Numair had set the stones around them to glowing, another and showy reckless use of his Gift, but it was better than digging in the dark. “There are old catacombs in the upper cities, but down here? I didn’t think they …”

He faltered.

Numair looked down. If he lifted his Gift upward, he could feel the heat of the flames and the centre of the damaged city. They were under the blast zone. If Savigny and Daine had fallen as the ground had dropped out under them, they were down here.

They were down further.

“You both should go back,” he said. “We’re out of water, and I don’t know what’s down there.”

Raoul, smiling grimly, said, “No.”

Don, softly, said, “No.”

Numair looked at the king, knowing there was nothing he could say to dissuade Raoul of his silliness. “It’ll be dark,” he warned him, remembering that Don, like Numair, feared the dark. “I won’t be able to light the stone down there if I’m to keep everything from sliding on top of us.”

Don shrugged.

Numair reminded him, “We could die. Anything could happen.”

“Then Eloise becomes queen,” said Don. “Constant beside her. There are worse fates for Galla, you must admit. Why do you think I made him stay behind?”

Numair gave up. There was no turning back now.

They’d find them, or their bodies; nothing else was acceptable.

Deeper, they went.

Raoul lit an oil lamp as Numair pulled his Gift back, dimming the stones they walked on. It did very little against the dark. It just made them realise how much dark there was versus the thin lights the lamp gave them. They’d only brought one. There hadn’t been time to grab more, and Numair was uneasy about the flame anyway.

At one point, it guttered. They were left in the absolute pitch black of the darkest night, Numair flinching from where he was testing the walls of the tunnel they were walking down. Don, who was standing close to him, felt him flinch.

“You’re scared of the dark?” Don asked, his voice surprised. Numair couldn’t see his face.

“Yes,” Numair said shortly. Thinking of a similar query from Savigny, in a similar place, took his breath away. They were taking too long.

“But you came down here?”

Numair smiled weakly, knowing he was safe from Don seeing it even as the sounds of Raoul struggling to relight the lamp threatened to give him away. The three of them stood in the dark, relentlessly afraid.

“Fear is no reason for inaction,” he reminded the uneasy king, who made a soft sound that expressed neither agreement nor disagreement. Numair cast about and made his own noise, this time of frustration. “I can’t _feel_ them. There’s so much old magic down here, laced into the stone walls.”

Don was quiet for a moment, before nudging Numair slightly with his shoulder as he leaned in a direction. “That way,” he said distantly, Numair looking in his general direction. “They’re over there.”

“And how can you possibly know that?” Raoul said. The lamp caught. Light spilled over them, driving back the dark. Don was staring down a tunnel that dipped into more darkness, dust floating in the sullen air down it. His expression was vacant, his gaze unfocused. “Majesty?”

Don didn’t answer; he just started walking.

They hurried to catch up.

Numair wasn’t happy. There was something down here with them, he was becoming increasingly certain. It wasn’t just that Don didn’t seem to be attending to anything they said to him anymore. Even Raoul was getting, as he put it, a bad case of the “heebies”.

“We’re being watched, Numair,” said Raoul for the fourth time, sticking so close to Numair that Numair was in danger of getting his heels stepped on every time he ducked to avoid a low-hanging ridge of ceiling. Don, no matter what the others did, just kept walking.

“Stop talking about it,” Numair suggested. “Maybe if it doesn’t think we know about it, it won’t bother us.”

It wasn’t a good suggestion, but it was the best he had.

And Don just kept walking.

In the end, Numair reached out and grabbed Don’s hand to stop from losing him, clinging tight. To his surprise, Don tightened his grip, breaking out of his daze just briefly to look at Numair, look down at their hands, and then give a wistful smile.

“Thank you,” he said, looking for the first time like a shadow of the man he used to be as he smiled at Numair like they were friends. “We’re not far now. Can you feel it?”

Numair tested their surroundings, which was horrible. It reminded him just how much earth was between them and the sky above. It also told him that, ahead, the ground was soft and loosely packed, and that it didn’t belong here. It was the bare remains of what had once been above, which seemed impossibly deep until Numair considered just how circular their path had been to come down here. They might not be that deep at all, though he was definitely unwilling to place gold down on that supposition.

“Are you going to tell us how you found them?” Raoul asked Don as Numair inched ahead, feeling the stone walls to get his Gift just that little bit further, looking with his magic as he’d once looked for a black-and-pink rose.

“Not them,” said Don, his voice still strange. “Just Savigny. He’s my Gift. We’re a part of each other. It’s like … looking for something that should be inside me, but isn’t. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s awful hot in here.”

Numair paused on that, thinking again of Pech telling them of the king’s repressed Gift. He’d looked at the king, of course, trying to see if he could spot a glimmer of it. He hadn’t seen it. He’d figured perhaps it was small, or hidden, or just faded from lack of use; he’d never considered that maybe it wasn’t in there at all.

“I’m tired,” said Don suddenly, sounding it. He’d slumped against a wall, his eyes closed. “It’s hard to breathe.”

Realisation hit Numair like a cart horse.

“Gods,” he whispered, switching his vision to his mage sight and looking, _really looking,_ at the king. Finally, he saw it, and no wonder he’d missed it for so long as he doubted it had never been pulled on this much – the thinnest, finest ghostly thread latched deep into Donatien’s very core, which was thinning further as Numair looked at it. Pech had been right; Savigny _did_ have use of the king’s Gift, but they were both failing now.

There was no more time to be subtle. Donatien began to slide down the stone, his lips turning blue.

Numair turned to the wall that the thread of Gift vanished into, and he reached out with his Gift and tore it open.

Shuddering, exhausted, terrified, Numair opened his eyes to find himself on his knees with his ears ringing and his eyes so gritty from dust he could barely see. More dust billowed around him, Numair so tired that it felt as though he was seeing it all in slow peels of time. He was vaguely aware of Raoul plunging past him, and Don staggering upright as a cloud of dust blew straight into him and set him to coughing. He was also aware of his bloodied knees, and his Gift stretched out around him fighting to hold up the sky, and he was …

He blinked. Turned.

Swallowed as he realised that there was a shape in the dust, formless and illusive. Whatever the something was, it was here, it was leaning over him, it was touching him with shapeless fingers that didn’t exist and it was –

 _~ give the God-child our regard ~_ said a voice as formless as the rest of the figure, and then the dust settled and Numair thought they were alone. His exhaustion had faded, somewhat, the stone around him settling into a cautionary stability. Something, not Numair, had caught the world and held it steady for him. He stood up, uneasy with this show of kindness from something that hadn’t felt human at all.

He heard a soft chuckle.

 _~ it’s about time the Hunt God came home to us ~_ said the voices.

And then they were definitely, absolutely gone. Numair felt more alone than he ever had.

“Numair!” Raoul bellowed. Numair snapped back, turning to find Raoul manhandling a slab of stone. Numair launched up there, helping to lift it up – and almost yelling with surprise as Don crab-scuttled under, almost getting brained. But then they had it out of the way, sliding it carefully down the shale Numair had created of the wall so it didn’t shake the wall back down, and Numair turned back to the hole they’d opened.

Daine blinked at them, barely visible so coated in dust she was. Her mouth opened and closed, but no noise emerged. Numair patted at his pockets, finally finding the flask of water he’d secreted in there and not used on their way down, knowing it would be needed now. Sidling past Raoul, he crawled into the hollow Savigny had shaped for them and slid into place beside her. She blinked up at him with ash-coated lashes, face set in an expression like she’d cry if she had the water to do it.

“Shh,” he said to her, placing the flask at her cracked lips and only letting her sip. “It’s okay, magelet. We’re here. We found you.”

As she sipped, he chanced a glance down at the other occupant of the hollow, his heart thudding fit to bust. He hadn’t though he could look until now, even though the trace remains of the spell Numair had broken when he’d cracked it open like an egg told him that the man was alive. And he _was_ alive, dirty and bloodied and a ghastly shade of grey-brown under the dust, but alive. His chest was moving. His hand lifted to touch at Don’s cheek, wonderingly, his eyes slitted open though Numair didn’t think they were seeing anything.

“It was you,” Numair heard Savigny croak out to the king. Don’s face was obscured by his hair, so hunched over he was with his hands settled one on Savigny’s cheek, the other on his heart. “I thought I felt you calling.”

“You kept trying to go to sleep,” Don breathed, his voice ruined. “I knew you’d die if you did. I was almost too late.”

“Never,” rasped Savigny. “You’d never.”

And then he closed his eyes and fell still.

Raoul couldn’t fit, but he crouched and peered in. “There’s blood dried in here,” he commented, lifting the lamp so they could see the rusty smears and pools splashed about. Some on the ground they sat upon where it had puddled, some scratched into the walls. Numair used his free hand to grab one of Daine’s and was heartbroken to see that she’d clawed them bloody trying to dig them out.

“Darling,” Don gasped, having seen the same. Daine smiled weakly at him.

“We should get them out, fast,” Raoul added. “I’ll carry the lord. He won’t be walking, and, no offence, Majesty, but you’re not big enough to haul him. Numair?”

“I’ve got Daine,” Numair promised, looking her right in the eyes as he says it. “If she’ll let me?”

Her response was a weak smile as she slumped against his chest, wrapping his arms around his neck as he lifted her into his lap and began to slide out of the hole with her. He’d carry her out of here and into the sun, he knew, determined that, if she needed it, he’d carry her as far as she needed to go. He was too proud of her to do any less, even if his arms were already sore from the very idea of it. Besides, he was getting the better end of the deal. Despite being far stronger than Numair, Raoul grimaced at the weight of Savigny as he settled the man onto his shoulder. Numair felt queasy seeing how limp his lover was in the bigger man’s hold. Though he knew over-the-shoulder was the only way Raoul was getting Sav out of here, it did make him look uncomfortably like a corpse, especially with the dust paling his skin so horribly.

Don seemed to think the same, judging from his deeply anxious expression as he lingered so close to Raoul he could probably have counted along with the other man’s heartbeats.

Raoul noticed him lingering.

“If you keep pace with me well enough,” he said with a grunt, settling Savigny better onto his shoulder and passing the lamp to Don, “you can hold onto his hand as we go. He’ll probably drift in and out, and it’ll keep him quiet.”

Don didn’t need to be asked twice; though it must have been uncomfortable for Raoul to set his pace against the shorter man’s, Don grabbed onto Savigny’s hand as though he never planned to let go again.

Numair felt strange at seeing it, muddled up inside. Through his relief and his exhaustion, he realised that Savigny hadn’t once looked to him or called out. It wasn’t a surprise since Sav was barely conscious. And he pushed it aside as something to ponder when they were out.

It was his turn.

He slid free from the space which had almost become a grave, and lifted Daine into his arms as gently as he could. He wasn’t man enough to carry her as Raoul was Savigny; instead, he settled her across his chest, one arm behind her back, the other under her knees, and let her support her weight by clinging to him herself. It meant he could feel her continually beating heart against him, as she could his.

After today, he needed that.

“You are spectacular and brave,” he told her once they were upright as he settled her slight weight better against himself. “But you can sleep now, if you need. You’ll be home by the time you wake up.”

She found tears then, from somewhere. He felt them against the skin of his throat.

He loved her even more for being brave enough to shed them.


	35. The People’s Queen & her Paper-Craft King

Magisra Cole had always said that even paper could be powerful, if folded in just the right way. Donatien had never really believed in that, even when Savigny had taken it upon himself to learn all the fancy methods of folding beasts and buildings out of nothing but a cleverly cut piece of parchment. It had annoyed Savigny greatly that, though he was the one who liked the craftwork the best while Don had been scornful of it, it had been Donatien who – when pressed to join in – had shown to have an innate ability to tell which shapes would suit which parchments and how to strengthen each fold and turn each corner to its prettiest angle. It had been funny at first, how frustrated Savigny had been by this, much as it had been funny that Don was the better singer despite detesting singing with all his heart.

Both things had become less amusing with time. Donatien thought of Savigny toiling for days over craftwork that Don had finished in half the time with a sliver of the pleasure, and he thought of Sav fighting to train his voice back to the clear tones he’d had before the gods had granted him a man’s rough voice while Don’s soft treble had easily slipped into a warm, graceful tenor. Don loved Savigny’s hard-won noble baritone much more than his own untrained voice, but he knew Sav didn’t feel the same. It now felt supremely unfair that Don earned so little but was given so much.

This moment seemed very indicative of that.

Donatien, King of Galla, looked at himself in the mirror that stood whole against his dressing room wall. He felt dazed but clear. He was furnished splendidly in a silver cloth shirt with the opulence of his velvet dress coat overtop, resplendent with buttons of pearl and true gold. Silken embroideries of the Alaire rose decorated his outfit in lines of black, his hands gloved softly, his hose the deepest shadow. None of the clothes were his. They came with the crown.

The crown, he thought, and shivered. Ignobly, it sat upon a cushion made of velvet older than even his inherited coat. He’d set it wearily upon the dresser, as though it was heavier than it actually was. As a child, he’d loved the crown. It was beautiful, thin, elegant, the tines twined like the antlers of stags with roses curled about them. It had no jewels or trappings. It was simply allowed to be beautiful in its stark triumph, much as the mountains they lived upon were. Glory, how he’d loved it.

Then again, as a child, he’d loved many things he had no right to.

“I have no right,” he said to his anxious reflection, alone in his rooms as he should be pleased to be. He wasn’t, however. Right now, he’d even be thankful for the hallucinations. But they hadn’t resurfaced in weeks now. Not since he’d taken Savigny’s advice and allowed Magisra Salmalín to teach him methods to settle the mind combined with the soothing drinks that Pech had been surreptitiously substituting Ossika’s concoctions with.

It was fall. Months from when they’d pulled Savigny out from a certain death below the city. In that time, Donatien had been given all he hadn’t earned, just like he always had. He’d been given strength, given friendship, given comfort; he’d been given Salmalín’s sense and Savigny’s companionship and Constant’s love and the certainty of a less uncertain future.

He hadn’t earned any of it.

“I have no right,” he said again, sick with the terror of this day.

Savigny had always moved so quietly.

“Don’t be foolish,” he said from the door when he must have crept in without Donatien hearing him. Don half-turned, half-clutched at the dresser to keep himself upright. In the end, Savigny approached him. He took the crown into his hands, garishly silver against the hickory brown of his skin. Sacrilegious, if it had been anyone else’s hands. Of the man and the crown, Don knew which he found more beautiful. More worthy of touch. His heart beat as though he was on the brink of death, greedily galloping to claim every beat for itself. And Savigny, so close, said, “You’ll earn it every day you strive to do better.”

Without ceremony, he settled the crown atop Donatien’s head, among the curls that men of the staff had spent all morning tidying into flawlessness. Don could look at his reflection and distantly consider that he was a striking sight, perhaps, but he didn’t feel it in his heart. He just felt sallow and cold. No great prize. The crown made that worse.

“You’re a mess,” Savigny lied after a moment, both knowing it wasn’t true. Don had never before been preened to such a state of perfection. But neither said it. It allowed Savigny to fuss, to straighten Don’s already straight collar and brush down his coat and to, eventually, touch a finger to a curl which accidentally turned into the softest pressure against Don’s jaw. Don watched him wordlessly, feeling every touch sear him to his very bones.

After all, they’d agreed, this would be their last, hadn’t they, all those months ago, when it had still been summer …

_… Savigny, desolate in his stripped-down state, his skin mottled with ash still and gravel-sliced to pieces where he’d taken the blows that would have felled Daine. Daine had grouchily agreed to Salmalín helping clean her wounds, seeing as it would involve a level of undress she was unwilling to be in front of Donatien and that she certainly didn’t want to be in front of Hartholm household staff, who were strangers. Don had been momentarily curious about why she was pliable to Salmalín undressing her, but then he’d been distracted by the realisation that this left either him or the servants to help Savigny, unless they were to wait for Salmalín to be done with Daine._

_But Sav had snapped, “Help me,” and demanded Don’s arm, which Don had never been able to deny him._

_Now, here they were, Sav breathing hard as he buckled exhaustedly over the bloodied bathwater. He wore a loincloth still, but there was gravel rash stippled down his spine and the grey cloth was gruesomely brown with spent blood. It needed to all be cleaned. Don ignored his own exhaustion and rinsed his hands with the aloe oil they’d taken from Daine’s stores, before returning to the tedious work of picking shrapnel from Savigny’s wounds._

_Don spoke first, though he knew Savigny must be expecting him to lash him further with accusations of idiocy seeing as he’d been caught burnt-handed assisting in the destruction of city temples. But Don was too tired for that. Too aware of how it had felt to look at his centre, where Savigny blazed brightly inside of him, and realise that Savigny was slipping into a starved sleep, feeling the trickles of dirt on air-hungry lips, knowing rather than hearing Daine screaming herself hoarse –_

_“I think I’m going to do something stupid,” said Don, Savigny straightening to look at him. “If you can believe it. I’m going to marry Alianora.”_

_No matter how long he lived, Don thought, somehow meeting Savigny’s shocked stare, he’d never stop loving those actinolite eyes …_

… Savigny was speaking.

“You’ve been drifting more,” he said, frowning as he studied Don. “Even Numair says it’s hard to keep you present. How is this better than the hallucinations?”

Don rubbed his eyes. “It’s the soothing drinks,” he confessed. “Pech is trying to stop them from dazing me, but he says it’s difficult to balance that against their effectiveness. The absences are brief so I just seem distracted, not maddened. I’m never confused about my reality, just occasionally out of step.”

Privately, he thought, at least this way I always know you’re you.

“I want to do something stupid,” he added with a wistful smile that Savigny, for a moment, returned, as though the past few months of their renewed and cautious friendship had allowed this brief snippet of affection, “if you’ll allow it.”

“Since when have you cared what I allow?” There was an edge of bitterness in Sav’s voice that saddened Don, who knew this day had put it there. But there was nothing to be done about it. No matter how either of them felt about what was to happen hours from now, it needed to be done, even though Don hadn’t earned it and Sav didn’t deserve it.

Softly, torturously, Don whispered, “You promised me you’d prove it,” even though he knew he had absolutely no right …

_… to ask this._

_Savigny was stone-still with shock, water beading from his hair. Bandaged and clean but still ruined despite that, just stock-quiet in the middle of his bed as he looked at nothing in particular. Don didn’t know what to do with himself. He was ruining it all again._

_“One day,” Don pressed, his lying, wicked, greedy tongue running without him. “Just one day beside me, please. I can’t … I can’t do it alone.”_

_“Is that really what you want?” Savigny asked, his voice rusty. Don should let him sleep. Salmalín had said Sav had used every last iota of his Gift, exhausting himself further than anyone should if they wished to stay alive. Don himself had seen the injuries Savigny was littered with, though they bled worse than they actually were. His body would heal faster than his magic. “Me beside you for one day? As your pet once more? Or as your illicit lover? Mocking her with our sordid history?”_

_“No,” said Don. “I want you beside me as my friend, as we were before we were anything else. If I’m to marry her, Sav, I do it for my kingdom. She’s exactly what Galla needs, what I need to save my people. But I need you – I need to know that there’s still something of who we were left, that we’re beside each other as we said we would be.”_

_The shudder to Savigny’s voice was no longer just exhaustion. Don could hear the grief there too. “That’s not fair,” he said, gritting the words out as though they were as painful as the rubble they’d almost been crushed by. That rubble that had dropped atop them had saved them from the heat of the explosion though, Don reminded himself. Sometimes pain was necessary. “We said I’d be beside you as your_ husband, _not like_ this. _You want me to watch you marry someone else?! How strong do you think I am?”_

_That floored Don. He hadn’t imagined for a moment that, “It would be hard for you?”_

_And there it was, the truth in the way Savigny looked at him. There was so little space between them on the bed; there was so much time driving them apart. And Savigny was looking at him as though it was just the two of them alone at the end of the world._

_“My kingdom for one last kiss,” Don said, stupidly, foolishly, but he’d reaching into the earth and ripped this man out and he couldn’t bear the feeling of knowing that never again, just as surely as if they’d died down there, would they feel each other; their love was gone, their friendship too. Everything was over. The exorbitant price of a blood-soaked crown._

_Savigny had gone strange and stiff at Don’s reckless statement. He looked to the door. He looked to Don. Don recoiled, remembering Beltane; remembering that Savigny was fighting like a snared coney to escape the trap Don’s love represented._

_“You tell me you’ve agreed to an engagement and then ask to kiss me?” was Savigny’s swollen statement. It dripped into the room, fat with the fetid weight of everything it carried. It was made all the worse by how lovely Savigny’s voice was and how, even after all this time, it made Don feel better just for hearing it. Even if it was angry. Even if it was breaking his heart. “Why is it you take two steps forward in your growth towards becoming a human being and then five back? Isn’t that exhausting?”_

_“It’s not a love match,” said Don, who was committed to idiocy, it seemed._

_“I’m with Numair,” Savigny reminded him._

_“And is that a love match?” Don fired back._

_He should have expected Savigny’s sharp, “Yes.” How fast it came still hurt. “Why is it so important? You know we’ll never be together again. Not like that.”_

_Don didn’t have to think about that to answer. It was simple. They’d always been simple, really, the two of them; their hearts had always beat to a rhythm that was unique to the two of them, learned by rote over two shared lifetimes of loneliness._

_“No one has loved me since you did,” he said, ignoring that Savigny blatantly loved him still. That was a truth that they had to lay to rest here. It would die with their shared heartbeat. “When I marry her, as a king, I ensure and accept that no one will love me again. As a man, I just want one last reminder that it existed. Sometimes I think I hallucinated it too, along with everything else.”_

_“Don,” breathed Savigny, though it was more like a gasp. He, somehow, pulled himself upright and tried to come to where Don was hunched over, but he couldn’t make it. Instead, Don went to him. They didn’t touch, though they were close enough that they could; probably, they were too scared to in case, much like when they’d been children, they found it impossible to let go again. “Prince, I’ve loved you always, even when I’ve hated you. It wasn’t a hallucination. If I could stand the taste of your policies, I would have never left your side.”_

_Don closed his eyes and leaned his head against Sav’s shoulder, gently. It was the most unbruised part of the other man. It was the only place he dared to touch him. Sav, briefly, pulled away and took with him Don’s ability to breathe. But he shortly came back._

_He leaned his own head against Don’s, forehead to forehead, both with their eyes closed._

_“I can’t kiss you,” said Sav, eventually. “It’s not fair to Numair, not without him knowing. And I’ve hurt him in so many ways this month, I won’t find another. But if you promise that this, this ridiculous, maddening,_ fantastic _scheme of yours – tell me this is you becoming better. That this is you becoming the king I dream of standing beside again, even when it cuts me to knives knowing you’ve a queen in my place. Tell me that and I promise, I’ll find a way to prove we existed.”_

_And Don said …_

… “Please.”

He’d expected a trinket. Some small memento from when they were small. Perhaps a book, or a beautifully written letter. In the months since he’d announced his engagement, as the city and then the country had reacted explosively to the knowledge he was making a queen of a baker, he’d held close the knowledge that, one day, Sav would give him something tangible to hold. Something to carry him through the days ahead, the wedding today, the political scandal, the chilling realisation he’d had that he’d showed his hand now and those who’d thought him tame now knew he was off leash. Something to close his eyes and cling to in the days to come, the weight of a king’s duty to his people when given a queen to complete that duty with.

Now, though it was so late to be doing so, he stupidly asked for his promised trinket. He needed it. Though he’d never felt saner, thanks to Numair and Pech, he’d also never felt more afraid.

Savigny, standing there so close and real, gave Donatien exactly what he’d asked for. He gave him the proof Don had asked for, the reality of what they’d clumsily lost along the way. It hurt more than anything imaginable.

They hadn’t kissed in four years.

Don, pulling away and opening his eyes, lips burning, lungs stopped up with air he was afraid to release, heart fit to leave him here as it went its own way it was going so frenetically, found that Savigny’s eyes were open, and they were wide, and his lashes were damp. Neither was breathing as they should. Neither would probably breathe as they should ever again.

It was Sav who spoke, which was terrible. It should have been Don damning them, not Sav.

“We loved so much,” he said, turning away. There was hurt in every line of his body. “We deserved better.”

What could Don say to that?

Knowing it was true wouldn’t change it.

There was a soft cough by the doorway, both looking around to find Numair standing there with a sheepish expression. Don flushed hot and cold with panic briefly, as he fancied being caught doing something so illicit as kissing a man he had no right to on the morning of his wedding day, but the mage didn’t look surprised. Simply embarrassed, as though he hadn’t intended to walk in on this. The parameters of the love between Savigny and Numair baffled Don and, he knew, always would.

He stepped back and said a terse, “Yes?” that was too rude for how much he liked Numair, now, though it lost some bite as his voice caught and cracked.

Savigny’s shoulders shook and Don thought he was laughing. It was almost a relief; they’d laugh and the tension would be lost, and then Don would send them away to finish dressing, and then they’d go down and King Donatien of Galla would shake the world by making a queen of a commoner. It would make it easier. Don twisted his mouth into a smile –

– and realised that Savigny wasn’t laughing at all. Don froze in place with his expression garish, his soul stricken, and no one moved until Numair whispered, “Oh, love,” and crossed the room in two long strides to take Savigny into his arms. Savigny buried himself into that hold, muffling any sounds he was making into the fabric of the other man’s shirt.

Don touched his fingers to his lips, which were warm. He tasted salt upon them. He’d loved so many things he had no right to.

It was time to give them back.

And it began with him, right now, turning and leaving the room alone, his head held high despite the weight of that desolate silver crown.

As a Gallan on the cusp of marriage, Don needed to pay tribute to his gods. He no longer had a patron deity, though he had secretly followed Weiryn for a small time as a child before he’d realised that a Hunt God does indeed hunt. Though both Daine and Savigny had teased him about this, telling him that hawks and hounds – and even Don, when ran his own – hunted for their dinner, Don had felt uneasy claiming the eye of a god of blood and bone. He coursed his hawks and his hounds for their wellbeing, giving the meat they captured back to the beasts who craved it. He never hunted for himself, nor ate the flesh of anything with a mind that Daine could speak to. He hadn’t eaten meat since the day he’d met Daine, who’d told him that animals talked with her as clearly as humans did each other.

Weiryn had quite lost his shine with Don since then, even as an illicit patron deity as Don, as king, was not allowed to favour one god over another. He’d never chosen another. It hadn’t seemed worth the risk, since Don was willing to admit he’d only loved Weiryn as a child because he’d adored the idea of becoming an antlered forest creature.

Taking care not to splash his fine clothing, Don washed his face and hands in the bowl the hooded priest offered him. The priest wore the non-denominational robes of the royal ceremony, which obscured his face in case he was someone Don would recognise. Don was not allowed to know which temple the man belonged to, in case he saw it as a sign of a particular god’s favour. Though Don paid tribute as any Gallan did on the hour before his matrimony – as Alianora was doing, separately – he alone walked in without a single god watching him. In theory, they would all be there.

In practice, he was certain he’d be alone.

The priest lowered the bowl, gesturing to the door of the chamber where Don would spend the next hour in silent contemplation. It was kept dark, which dried his throat as he remembered the darkness under the city and how it had tried to swallow him whole. Normally, the person who kneeled within would have a single member of their family to accompany them, to guard them in case something went wrong and as a reminder of their human ties even as they prayed to their god. Don’s family was dead, except for his sister.

“Lady Solange …?” Don rasped out, nerves shattering his voice. He was scared of the dark. He was scared of the act of contemplation. He was scared of being alone. He was, simply, scared.

The priest shook his head. He wasn’t permitted to speak.

Solange wasn’t here.

Don fought to hide how much that hurt. He loved his sister with the fierce, distant love of a brother who’d never been allowed to be close to a beloved sibling. They’d been kept apart for reasons he’d never been privy to, until the moment of their mother’s death. After that, they’d found an uncomfortable middle-ground between together and apart, and he’d hoped it would be enough to have her stand with him as he kneeled.

“Very well,” he said. He took a breath, during which he bundled up the thought of his sister’s betrayal and Savigny’s sadness and buried them deep in the back of his mind. Alone, he’d walk to his fate. Alone was what he deserved. “Proceed.”

The priest walked to the door. It only took a gentle push of his hand to open. The darkness within yawned dark and horrible.

Don walked forward.

“Wait!”

Don whirled, unable to stop the smile that broke his misery. For the first time, he felt a flicker of pleasure in the day – and, as his eyes caught those of she who was scurrying to join him, almost tripping over the hem of her long gown, he felt the rarest, most delightful bubble of pride. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

Daine, muttering furiously at her dress, yanked off her delicate shoes and met him midway, barefoot and with one hand holding her intricate braided hair in place. She looked beautiful, though Don was of the opinion she always did. Even more so today, in her stormy blue gown with the loveliest beading he’d ever seen. More beads were draped through her braids, catching the light like stars among her masses of curls. Don knew, as soon as he caught sight of them and how they matched so splendidly the delicate shoes she held, that Savigny had chosen this gown, those shoes, this entire ensemble. He was the only one who knew how to capture their best, and only he would have had the tailor embroider those delicate suggestions of wolves among the beads upon her dress.

“I’m to sit with you,” said Daine with a stubborn toss of her chin. He caught her in a hug, delighting in the touch of one he loved so much. “You’re allowed family and I’d like to see the person who’d dare to tell me I’m not.”

“People will talk,” Don commented without really caring.

“Then this gossip named People needs to learn to hold their tongue before I hold it for them,” Daine retorted. “Come on – if you’re to make it in time, we need to go in.”

They both looked at the priest, who was impatiently holding the candle which would melt to mark the hour they must spend in the room. Don grinned sheepishly at the man, his good humour returned, and turned back to the room.

This time, he had his sister at his side.

“To think, darling,” he said to her, as they approached the door together, “that I was standing here feeling so sorry for myself before you arrived.”

Daine said …

_… “Be quiet, Rainary.”_

_Rain stopped, standing there with her teeth gritted and her expression agonisingly torn between hollering at her king and listening to Daine, who was between the furious captain and Don who was attempting to become one with the curtain he was backed up against. Nora, unconcerned, was eating a sweet-cake from her inglorious sprawl into a soft chair. Savigny was leaning against a wall, pretending he wasn’t there. Numair was lying on the bed, on his stomach, propped on his elbows with his chin in his hands and watching everything with a wide-eyed guile Don didn’t believe for an instant, though he did admit that the man looked the picture of innocence, what with Earnest fast asleep flopped across his back like a particularly thick rug._

_They’d just told Rainary of the engagement._

_“You’re going to get yourself killed,” snapped Rain, turning on her sister, who shrugged. “This is madness! No one will believe that he loves you. He lies with –” She gave Savigny a withering stare that Savigny also ignored. He was doing a much better job becoming one with the wall than Don was doing with the curtain. “– men.”_

_“Don’t say men in that manner,” said Nora before Don could, Don unable to help the startled look he gave her. “The Marquis deserves your respect more than most of us in here.”_

_Savigny blinked, as surprised as Don._

_“Did I do something recently deserving of praise?” Sav asked Nora, who ignored him. Apparently, her newfound respect of him didn’t extend as far as stroking his ego by telling him why she’d changed her tune._

_“My safety doesn’t matter, anyway,” Nora continuing, raising a hand as Rainary went to snarl again. “No, listen to me. Galla needs this, Rainy. Don’t think of me as your sister – think of me as a voice. Our people, they’re voiceless right now. They need me. Someone needs to speak for them who can’t be heard, and that someone has to be someone who straddles both worlds – enough so the toity nobility will accept me, but not so much that I’m a stranger to those outside of these walls. You know duty. You’ve always done your duty and I’ve never stopped you even when I’ve wished you’d leave him to get thrown from the palace walls –”_

_Don winced. Numair grimaced at him. Rain’s lips pursed thin._

_“– so let me do mine.” Nora finished and returned to her snack, leaving them all motionless in the awkward silence._

_It was Daine who spoke first._

_“You’re upset,” she said quietly, Rain looking away to avoid making eye contact with her. But Daine, when she decided to voice her opinion, would rarely be dissuaded. “I get it. I don’t want this to happen either. You’re sending a sister to become a queen, seeing her raised higher than you ever imagined with all the dangers that’s got built in. That’s awful. Well, I’m sending my brother to be hated by the one who’s supposed to love him, to spend his life with her seething beside him. He’s always been in danger, but now he’s in danger and in misery too. But I’m not going to stop him. Not if they think this is our chance to turn back everything that’s gone wrong.”_

_No one spoke. For once, even Nora seemed uncomfortable, as though Daine had put her on the spot and she didn’t know how to extract herself. Don, for his part, suspected he might be blushing, though mostly he was overwhelmed by the idea that there was at least one person out there who didn’t want him unhappy._

_“I’m fine with it, darling,” he said finally with a weak smile at Daine, sensing no one else was going to try spare Nora the awkwardness. “Nora is right. The people need a queen who’ll speak for them.”_

_“Maybe,” said Daine. “But you need to be spoken for too.”_

_After a beat, she added, “You’re people too.”_

_Don, shocked, realised that she meant it …_

… “Don?”

Don opened his eyes. His knees hurt. It was dark, though, he noticed, not as dark as he’d expected. He could see the outline of Daine kneeling beside him and, when he lifted his hand to examine it, some part of his eyes knew enough to trace the outline of his fingers. He wondered how much time they had left before it was time to exit the chamber through the external door, which led into the ceremonial hall where the nobility would be gathered, and Nora …

“Yeah?” he asked hoarsely. His voice was so loud in here.

For a moment, Daine didn’t answer. He figured she was pondering and didn’t push her.

“Sav supports you in this, you know,” she began, her words clipped as though she hadn’t really wanted to speak of Savigny right now. Don wished she wouldn’t, anyway. In the back of his brain, where he’d buried their Last Kiss and all the lost kisses before that, all the love they were suffocating below the weight of their miserable duty, the feelings he was choking down tried to surge up and overwhelm him. “But I’ve heard him fretting with Numair. Who’ll stand with you, now you’ve shaken up all the bags like this …”

Don was silent. He didn’t know how to answer. His grim feeling was “none of them”. And that was the gamble they’d taken, wasn’t it? The people may rejoice, but outside this chamber, well.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath that was noisy enough she’d know he was thinking about it, and knew …

_… It was the third council since he’d announced his engagement to Alianora of no noble name. The beggar’s queen, they were calling her in polite company. He was certain there was worse being whispered out of his earshot. But Nora was tougher than he was, and had barely flinched. Don, however, was struggling._

_The council consisted of one seat for each of the thirty-nine Gallan fiefs, plus Donatien as the crown. At some point during the past years, while Don had been ill in his head and likely locked in his room seeping in madness, a centuries old edict had been resurrected allowing three seats to also be taken by temple priests of appropriate standing._

_They’d also passed a ruling reducing Don’s powers in his own chambers. He could, quiet easily, be overruled now by his own nobility._

_And he was._

_It was the third council. The first had been by Don’s demand, summoning the nobility to turn back the mage restrictions. He’d used the fires that still burned in the lower cities as the fulcrum for this return to normal, arguing furiously that they needed magic back in Galla before it tore itself down the middle. It had been argued back that it was the magic that caused this. It went to a vote. Don was overruled by four votes. Just four._

_If he ever discovered who’d given seats to three priests from the Red Temples, he’d have words with them for sure. And he was more conscious than ever of the empty seats in the council chambers, all those nobles who refused to come to him, or refused to take their seats, or who were too young to vote with their regents disallowed to place a vote for them._

_The second council had come at a turning point, when Don had acted to confirm his engagement. Until then, it seemed, most had thought it was a joke, or an act of madness soon to be rectified. When he brought the peers together to vote on giving Darragon Fief to Elspeth de Darragon – who had_ precedent _for it, he thought furiously, they’d given fiefs to widows before! – punishment for his daring came swiftly. He was overruled by twenty votes._

_It was a damning reminder that he was only as powerful as those who followed him._

_The third was to act to stop a curfew being placed on the lower city, one that would see the might of the city guards fall heavily upon those who were already struggling. Don had been ignored when he’d disagreed with the need for it. This was his solution, and it was a gamble. He didn’t have enough support to stop this happening._

_That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try._

_When it came to the vote, he lost again, of course. But only by two votes. Apparently, he had been forgiven for his discretion in marrying Nora, at least for now. He knew that a reckoning would come the day of the wedding. More interestingly, today, he looked to the seats that had been empty and realised where the two votes he’d gained had come from._

_He stopped them, after the council broke up. The curfew would come into effect at midnight. Don had never felt more powerless._

_“You’ve taken Darragon then,” said Don to Pech de Darragon, gesturing to the seat that Pech had taken at the table, despite his many objections. He had mixed feelings about this. “I said to your aunt I’d keep fighting for her. She deserves that fief. It’s her home.”_

_“It’s still her home,” said Pech idly, fiddling with his snuff box. “I’m merely holding it. In the meantime, thanks to dear Auntie, I’ve been politely reminded that every seat counts and told to take mine. You’re welcome, by the way.”_

_Don nodded sadly. He looked to Pech’s companion._

_“No hounds in the council chamber,” he said with a weak grin. He and Eloise de Silvain had been friends, once. He couldn’t remember when they’d grown apart._

_She shrugged. “Lord Adel deserves better than to lose his kingdom because no one stood in his place when he was taken out of it,” was her tart response. “Besides, do you have any idea the mess you’ve set me up for, offering me a marriage into_ Hartholm _, of all places? I better learn my politics now otherwise Constant’s going to be running rings about me by the time he’s twenty.”_

_“He already does,” Don said with a thin smile. To Pech, he offered a weak, “We can find you a regent, to handle Darragon day to day.”_

_“I have one.” Pech sniffed. “Auntie has it in hand, since they’ll let her rule so long as a_ peer _, hah, oversees her. You might as well spend your time finding me a nice pyre. No doubt now I’ve painted myself as a target, I’ll soon be on it. What of you, though. A fall ceremony? You haven’t given yourself time to win them back. That’ll hurt you.”_

_Don winced. He was right. At the hour of the ceremony, as he exited the contemplation chamber into the small anteroom leading into the hall, those nobles who wished to be seen supporting his reign would be waiting. They’d kneel for him and then rise as he passed to walk behind him as he entered the ceremony, indicating their pleasure in his choice of queen. It was a line in the sand. Any Gallan knew that a figurehead was made on coronation day; it was the hour of a ruler’s wedding, when those lines were publicly drawn, that made a king or queen._

_No Alaire had ever walked the aisle with less than two-thirds of the peers behind them._

_“I guess we’ll see on the day,” he said, pushing the thought away. There was nothing to be done until the moment he …_

… opened the door.

He hesitated, for just a second, in the dark that felt almost welcoming compared to what waited out there. The line in the sand. He was a figurehead at this moment; would he ever be a king? Or would the next step confirm that he was alone and always would be?

A hand touched his elbow.

Daine.

No matter what, he’d have her.

Bracing himself, he pushed the door fully open, and stepped into the blazing light of the anteroom. For a moment, blinded as his eyes adjusted. Aware only of Daine still holding his arm, and the ache of ill-stretched legs. He knew he probably looked dazed and dishevelled. There would be servants standing by in case he needed to be groomed back to perfection before taking the next few steps, those which would take him to the door they waited to throw open for his final walk as a single man.

Then his eyes adjusted. He expected no one to be kneeling there. Who would follow him, a king of nothing but paper-craft and an ill-trained voice? A king of madness and disrepair? He wouldn’t have followed him.

But, then again, he was realising that so many looked up and saw more than he did.

“Oh,” he breathed, because it wasn’t good – it absolutely wasn’t – but it also wasn’t nothing.

They kneeled for him, heads bowed, because no one looked upon the ruler as they stumbled first into the light. It was proper to let him look upon them and collect himself, to decide how he’d react to the support he was given. He was glad for this care, right then. If they looked up now, they’d see that he was deeply, deeply touched by those who’d come for him.

Constant, of course, closest to the door. Somehow, he’d smuggled his dogs in with him, Bon Bon with her head bowed so elegantly Daine must have told her how. Earnest had his head bowed too, though only because Constant had a guiding hand on him, and the only sound in the room was his madly waggling rear end sliding across the tiles. He was excited that Don and Daine were there, and overwhelmed that Constant wouldn’t let him ricochet up to them. Pech kneeled beside Constant, resplendent in brightly coloured silks. Eloise beside him. And others, but Don ran out of time to examine them all.

“All rise for the crown,” came the quiet command, Captain Rainary stepping up beside Don as she gave the warning.

Constant stood a heartbeat before the others, half stooped with his hand holding the ruff of lace someone had tied around Earnest’s neck.

“Hartholm stands for the crown,” he said, his young voice clear and strong.

Don didn’t have time to answer because Pech had stood.

“Darragon stands for the crown,” he said, smile lazy. Eloise, next, added her voice, and her fief: Silvain stood for the crown. So too, as the others rose, did the fiefs Thurn and Montmorency, and so too did three fiefs headed by distant cousins who Don had been fond of when they’d been small and who gave him small smiles of support now that he’d never expected. So too did, to his shock, Guise Fief, Lord de Guise not smiling but rising for him anyway with a steady stare that implied his reasons for being here were not love for Donatien. Two more fiefs stood for him, names that he recognised as loyalists to the Alaire line. It didn’t matter that they were here for a bloodline he just happened to be a part of. They were here. That was ten.

But eleven, overall, stood for him.

Don turned to the last, his heart beating in his throat.

“Fief Alaire stands for the crown,” said Solange in her melodious voice, giving her a lackadaisical smile. “Did you think I’d abandon you, little brother?”

“You didn’t come to the chamber,” he admitted, hating the mild shake in his voice.

“A sister can sit with you,” said Solange. “A lady of her fief can stand for you. No one can do both. I’m exactly where I need to be.”

Not alone after all, Don thought. He straightened his shoulders. Eleven out of thirty-nine.

That was ten more than he’d expected.

“As soon as we step out of this room, all the eyes of Galla will be upon us,” he told them, his retinue of eleven. “There are those that would wish anyone loyal to me great harm. You all know this. Many of you stand here now because our enemies have already harmed you, harmed me, by striking down those who stood before you. If anyone wishes to stay, to remove themselves from those eyes – know this. No one here, by my command, will ever say otherwise. You won’t be blamed.”

There was silence. No one spoke. Even Earnest was quiet, though Don suspected judging from the side-eyes the half-grown hound was giving Daine, that was because he was getting a thorough scolding.

“And now,” said Don, breathing again, steadying himself, and looking forward, “we walk.”

As he crossed the room, they fell in behind. All eleven.

Not one left behind.

Gallans said no vows. Words were considered of less importance than the gestures that accompanied them. While a common marriage, by peasant or noble alike, would be headed by the temple of their choosing – officiated by the word of the god who headed it – a royal wedding was an affair watched over by all. Gods and people alike. It would be no priest who wrapped the cord around Donatien and Alianora’s arms to bind them; no holy hand was holy enough for this.

It would, instead, be their Gift.

It would be Savigny.

Don was not permitted to speak throughout the ceremony, nor was Alianora. He couldn’t even if he’d wanted to, his gaze locked on her to avoid giving away his heart by a reckless glance to Savigny. He memorised every last detail of Nora’s gown – it was white, decorated splendidly with silver embroidery that caught the light and glittered every time she moved. He spent so long staring at it, in fact, that he realised something he probably wouldn’t have otherwise noticed until their dance, later that night; the inner lining, revealed by cleverly designed slits in the skirt of the gown, was a midnight black, and the silver embroidery was mirrored upon it. Patterns that were simply sparkles and glitter on the white gown were, on the black lining below, revealed to be the Alaire rose repeated, a field of hidden flowers.

Savigny wound their hands together, Don so glad for the gloves they both wore. He couldn’t bear the touch of his hand, not right now, perhaps not ever. Instead, he focused on everything else: the unnatural silence of the watching crowd, the rasp of Sav’s uneven breathing, Daine who stood close behind Donatien in the place of his sister, the eleven nobles who lined the dais, the twenty-eight others who didn’t. The great wall of candles, one for every deity of Galla, that Donatien and Alianora, once joined, would light, inviting the gods down to witness their union. The things Don wasn’t attending to, very deliberately: the ceremonial vows that Savigny was intoning, every word like knives on Don’s soul; the distaste on so many faces in the watching crowd; the glitter of fear in Nora’s eyes now she was here, now this was happening; the weight of the iron cord on his limbs.

In a dream – perhaps, a nightmare – Savigny’s hands fell away. He took his gloves off. He said, and there was no ignoring this, “Kneel and be done, by the blood of Galla, the people who bleed for her.”

For the first, and only, time in his life, Donatien kneeled. Nora kneeled with him. Their heads were bowed, both barely biting back gasps as the Savigny anointed them with one cold sweep of a painted finger across a cheek each. Swathes of red.

“By the bones of Galla, the mountains that lift us above the world,” Savigny said. Another cold touch, to the other cheek of each of them. This time, slate grey. “By the skin, the forests that hold her flesh together, her glory and her strength.

Green, across the forehead.

One more.

“Son of our kingdom, you kneel as one,” Savigny said. His voice was so hoarse. Don kept his gaze latched on Nora and didn’t, absolutely didn’t, cry out like he wanted to. “By the blood and the bone and the skin of our nation, you rise again, whole, and gift unto your chosen queen the spirit only you can bestow.”

And he brought his thumb down to sweep across Don’s lip in a touch that was shattering, delicate, infinite, precious, over too soon; it left behind the final paint, the black of the rose.

Don stood, dizzy. There was a great susurrus of movement as the crowd kneeled in his place, ready to stand only when this moment was over. He felt ill. He accepted the crown Savigny offered him without washing his hands, as it would be sacrilege to wash the paint away before the deed was done. Green and grey and red, so much red, marring the silver tines of the smaller crown that would bow Nora’s head. Don felt, at that moment, like he was anointing her in blood. His gloves now marred too, he set the crown upon her head. Then he slid one of his gloves from his hand, laid it across his free wrist, obscuring the cord, and brought his own thumb to his lips. They were warm from Savigny’s touch. The kiss of the paint, sticky against his skin, he transferred to Nora, touching his fingers to her mouth and leaving behind the smudge of black from his own mouth. They wouldn’t kiss. Kissing wasn’t permitted. There was to be no illusion of love at this ceremony, even where love existed; kings and queens were creatures of duty, not passion.

No one made a sound.

“By the spirit of Galla,” said Savigny, stepping back. “We are crowned, all of us, by the strength of our king, his hands that hold us steady upon her holy back. All rise, for Alianora d’Alaire, Queen of Galla.”

Traditionally, they would rise with enthusiasm. Given a queen, the crowd would cheer. They’d cry and throw ribbons and flowers, breaking the silence that locked their king and queen into muteness before them.

This crowd rose in silence, standing just as silent as Don and Nora.

It was all so wrong.

Don looked at Nora, who gazed expressionlessly out at the furious mass of people. He mouthed, “I’m sorry,” as he felt, somehow, responsible for this organised rejection of her. But she wasn’t looking. She didn’t see his repentance.

Savigny, belatedly – Don realised that Sav, too, had been waiting for the crowd to welcome their queen, only stumbling over the final line now as he realised they weren’t going to – murmured, “So mote it be.”

And it was done.

They were supposed to be faking a deep love for the people, the reason for this illicit match. It wasn’t as hard at this exact moment as Don suspected it would become in the future, because this was horrible and the ceremony was devoid of affection, and it was the easiest thing in the world to grab for her hand and cling on tight. She even tightened her grip back, holding him firmly as they stepped down from the dais and walked down the aisle between the two wings of the crowd. No one threw flowers over them or kissed their fingers to show they shared in the spirit that had been gifted freely this day. They just drew back in an inhuman, uneasy mass. Maybe some wanted to celebrate, as was tradition, but they didn’t know how when those at the forefront were so determined to be cold.

Thus, in silence, steeped already in hate, Don and Nora walked together for the first time in front of their furious people, the nobility who loathed them for this choice they’d made. Don felt sick. His head was beginning to ache. He was scared that the broth Pech had prepared for him this morning was fading. He hadn’t drifted once, all ceremony, and that meant that perhaps the hallucinations, brought on by panic, by fear, would return –

A single flower was proffered from the crowd by an elegant hand, Don twitching away from it at first. A small ripple went through the guards, but they settled fast when someone stepped out to take Savigny’s arm. Don smiled when he saw who it was, catching the tossed flower with his free hand when Numair Salmalín flicked it at him. The smile the mage returned was kind. And right then Don needed kind, trapped surrounded by anger as they crossed the floor to the balcony doors, which would open and deposit them in front of their city.

Every step dragged. The distance was an eon.

Don was terrified of seeing what waited on the other side. If here, in this room, surrounded by the people who’d known him his whole life and who punished him so grievously for stepping out of line, if in here was so terrible, what would the commoners do to enact their revenge? It barely helped that he had Daine behind him and Nora’s hand in his; it barely helped that Savigny and Numair walked behind him, that Constant was there with his hounds, that he had eleven fiefs who’d stand for him if he asked it. Right then, he was terrified of the fantastic rejection he knew was coming.

They were at the doors. Don faltered.

It was Sav who spoke.

“Your kingdom, prince,” he said softly, so softly no one but Numair and Nora could possibly hear him. “It’s time you finally saw them.”

He was right. Don nodded, the paint drying on his face, Nora’s hand clammy in his. He’d lost his other glove.

The doors opened.

The King and Queen of Galla stepped out together, walking as one to the balcony that overlooked the streets below. There was a brief second of momentous silence where neither of them had the courage to look down. And then the people below realised they were there. It began as a dull chant as Don, shocked, looked down to see a wave pass through the mass of humanity clustered to see if it was true – if there was truly one of them standing atop the palace wall. The word spread that it was true, that Alianora was above them, their baker’s daughter – and the cheer became a roar, became a noise beyond description. They threw anything with reach, flowers, ribbons, hats. They stamped and screamed and cried.

Galla cheered as one for their People’s queen, Don finally finding his smile as he realised it was true. They really did have a voice, and they raised it for her.

He might have eleven fiefs, but Nora had the world.

If the day had ended there, Don could probably have gone to bed a contented man. A married man, yes, which he wasn’t quite ready to comprehend just yet – but contented, nevertheless, that his choice had brought something good into the world. But there was one trial left to surmount.

They were a people of dances, of parties and balls. Gallans loved an excuse to dress up and dance. Don couldn’t take that from there and, besides, he and Nora were supposed to be deeply and recklessly in love. There was no way they could pull that off without the first dance, where they would sweep into each other’s arms and put on the performance of a lifetime for all those nobility who’d sneered at them during the ceremony.

Nora, bizarrely, during the preparations for the ball, had made only one request: she’d asked that it be a masquerade. It hadn’t been a hard request, as there was little Galla loved more than a chance to accessorise further and past rulers had done much the same, but Don was baffled still. He’d done it though, and now he lurked at the high table once more looking down on a crowd of masks, much as he had all those months before when Nora had first come to him with her insane idea, now reality. It was a bizarre feeling.

He’d caught sight of Savigny only once, who’d changed of his ceremonial drab greys and was now delightful in a suit of green and blue, his mask that of a tropical bird of some kind. Feathers in warm colours of orange and yellow and red lit the mask up brilliantly against his dark colouring and the deep jungle green of his clothing. It was the kind of eye-catching that only Savigny dared, and Don felt like the peahen in comparison in his own whites and blacks.

After that, he hadn’t had much time to sulk. There was Pech with a flask that he’d slipped to Don, thankfully, and which had Don feeling much less frantic. Then Daine wished to dance, which he allowed because she was tipsy and giggling and he delighted in spinning her until she begged for mercy. Since he occasionally chose to act as her brother, he may have kept spinning her if Numair hadn’t rescued her from Don’s torment, sweeping her away much more sedately.

Solange caught Don’s arm next as Don peered after Daine and Numair.

“If I didn’t know Numair was Savigny’s, I’d swear those two are courting,” Don confessed to his sister, his guard down as he watched how Daine fell quite happily into Numair’s lanky grasp. “I’ve never seen Daine so familiar with a stranger.”

“Hardly a stranger,” Solange commented. “Savigny’s heart beats in him too. You and he would be spectacular friends, you know. You have the same energy.”

Don eyed her. He never knew when his sister was seeing truly, or simply being strange. She liked to keep people guessing.

“Be quiet and dance with me,” he commanded in his kingliest manner, earning a soft titter from her as she laid her head against his shoulder and let him sway her. Don closed his eyes too, comforted by his sister into not thinking about the dreaded dance with Nora. Imagine the horror of going through it all, only to be caught out so soon …

_… “This is never going to work,” Nora declared, flicking Don’s hands away from his waist. “I cannot dance with this man! He holds me like I sicken him.”_

_“You don’t,” Don protested. “We’ll try again. I promise, I’ll figure it out.”_

_But he knew he wouldn’t. He’d always been a dancing disaster, and that was only proving worse when he was so distracted by their teacher._

_Savigny sighed, stepping up to correct their postures again. “You must pull this off,” he warned them. “All eyes will be on the first dance and, unlike the ceremony, they_ will _be expecting emotion. Don, sit down. You’re breathing too fast again. Calm down while I work with Nora.”_

_Just like that, Don was dismissed. It hurt. He and Sav had been finding a cautious friendship once more, in the wake of Don accepting Nora’s plan, but it was fragile. Anything could shake it. Scolded, and still panting with anxiety and exertion, Don left the two of them to practice their steps as he walked over to where Magisra Salmalín was entertaining their special guest._

_Don looked down at her, distracted from his ineptitude briefly._

_“She’s looking thinner,” he commented, frowning as he squatted to feel Miel’s forehead. The toddler had been placed into the palace creche, but despite being fed properly, she wasn’t thriving. Don suspected she was missing the familiarity of the Black Rose, or she was grieving her parents’ lost arms. Even infants knew when people were gone who should be there._

_Numair bounced her on her knee, Miel giving a soft laugh._

_“It’s tough, losing everyone you love,” commented Numair, watching Don carefully. “Have you been doing those exercises I gave you?”_

_“Yes, maman,” said Don, earning a delighted laugh from the mage. Warm with the pleasure of that, Don took Miel into his arms and swept into the dance Savigny had been battling to teach them all morning, swaying around Numair with the baby laughing in his arms as he exaggerated the swirls and dips for her. “Do you like this? Alas, a tiny dancer. How Savigny will crow, little darling, little honey babe.”_

_He kissed her tiny nose, earning another squeal of delight. Miel, as was her wont, pressed her nose furiously against his, mashing her face against his in the way of affectionate kittens with their mamas. He couldn’t help it; he laughed. He did so love the boundless and unconditional affection of children and animals. They made him feel whole, like there was still good in the world. No matter how many mistakes he made, a cat would still purr for him, his chickens would bicker for his affection, and Miel would preen when he kissed her nose._

_“See,” he heard Nora saying, Don turning and finding her and Savigny watching him. Nora looked softly frustrated, but Savigny had the strangest expression. Don’s stomach did something very odd when he saw it, swooping as though he was still dancing instead of standing there with an armful of infant. “Unless he dances with me like he dances with that tot, we’re doomed.”_

_“I don’t dance with anyone like I dance with Miel,” said Don seriously. “She’s much smaller, for one thing.”_

_“Doomed,” said Nora again, walking …_

… towards him. Don, his arms empty, turned to find her in her white and black gown, the silver roses hidden in the lining that showed every time she took a step like stars that rewarded him for patiently waiting. She cut a startling, beautiful figure, crossing the dancefloor towards him. Her mask, like her dress, vivid in midnight black and starlight silver, with the eyes that watched him through it brilliant points of darkness. Don was frozen with fear as the music slowed, waiting for them to meet.

It was time.

If they didn’t convince the world they were in love, it was all over.

Then she was there. Don bowed to her, gallantly. She curtseyed back, and then took his arm without a word. It was night. The hall was lit only by the fire in the great hearth and the army of lanterns lit throughout the room. It made it a soft, warm light that hid imperfections and, thought Don, perhaps it would give them the edge they needed. A soft, romantic glow.

Then his doubts vanished as the music began, because somehow, _somehow_ , Nora had learned just how to move with him. They whirled into the dance, Don’s feet moving without him, his heart beating, his blood rushing, his world alive; she danced like she knew him, her eyes locked on his though he could barely stand to look at her. Her grip on his arms perfect, her weight against his so familiar, her …

Don swallowed. He missed a step, stumbling, but Nora caught him and made it part of the dance. It was a perfect move. An amateur dancer could never have done it.

The gown swirled around them, white and black, midnight and stars, a mystery in itself. An inner lining that was alluring, eye-catching. In movement, it drew the eye. One couldn’t help but look at it. A dress like that, it was designed to pull attention away from imperfections or, perhaps, from secrets.

Don wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her close, glad that she was taller than him as he gasped for air against her chest and, _oh¸_ confirmation. Her scent was overwhelming, his body lighting up like a Beltane fire. It was all he could do to hold her and keep dancing; it was all he could do not to collapse into her arms as though she was absolutely all he would ever need. He was dizzy with the dance, the drink, the drumbeat of his heart as it hammered out his secret to the world – that he _was_ in love, that he always would be, that he was right now, and then she laughed so softly and cradled him close and he knew he’d never recover from this.

“How dare you,” he choked into her chest, barely able to avoid marking her silks with his damp air and his burning eyes. “You couldn’t have warned me? A _masquerade_ , I should have known.”

“You needed to be convincingly in love,” whispered his partner, Nora’s mask and Nora’s dress but Savigny’s gorgeous, honey voice. “It was never going to work. Scold later, when we’re done performing, prince.”

But that was wrong. Don wasn’t performing at all. He set his teeth tight against each other and launched himself into the dance with a fury carried by eighteen years of tutelage in how to communicate solely via dance. He knew how to say _I’m furious_ with the set of his hand against the small of Savigny’s back, and he knew how to beat out _this is our last time_ against the floor with the rhythm of his feet and, most of all, he knew how to scream _I love you_ in the way his other hand reached up to the star-crossed mask and traced the line of it before bringing their faces together in a kiss completed only by their paper-craft faces.

It lingered.

The song ended and they broke apart, both breathing hard. Only now did Don realised just how green those eyes were in the black of the mask, those eyes he loved so much. They stared at each other, the two of them alone.

And then the world broke rudely back in as their onlookers broke into a startled, breathy cheer. They hadn’t been the only ones holding their air, it seemed.

“There,” whispered Savigny, his voice tight. “Hear that? They believe now.”

Of course they believed, Don wanted to scream. It wasn’t an _act_.

But Savigny had given as playful bow, touched his fingers to his masked lips, and swept away with the stars and roses of his gown, once again, drawing eyes away from the incorrect height and the elusive cut of the gown around his non-existent chest.

They’d planned this, Don knew, watching the man he loved leave. Right from the start, they’d planned this.

He no longer felt like celebrating. Nothing, after that dance, could ever feel as real again.

_“Maybe,” Don tried at the end of this dance practice, which hadn’t gone so badly this time, “maybe one day we’ll dance without faking our affection for each other. We’ve our whole lives together after all.”_

_Nora laughed coldly._

_“Fancy that,” she chuckled. “We’re not even married yet and that might be the stupidest thing you’ve ever said._

It wasn’t hard to break Miel out of the creche, where there were too many orphans needing care and not enough eyes. Nor was it hard to sneak into the menagerie, mostly since Don had been sneaking into it for almost two decades now.

This was how Nora found them, dressed once more in her fine gown as she came silently to the wall and leaned against it, looking down on where Don lay with his otters. Earnest was sleeping beside him, exhausted from being fed rich goodies all night. The otters talked amongst themselves. Don was looking up at the open ceiling of the enclosure, and Miel was asleep on his chest with her ear to his heart.

“She’s never slept alone,” he explained to her even though he didn’t want to speak to her at all, right now. “That’s why she’s so ill. She’s not eating or sleeping because they just set her alone to do both those things, and she’s always been around so many people. She’s not used to settling down without a heartbeat.”

Nora didn’t speak, not immediately. Instead, she climbed the wall – awkwardly, in her gown, and slipped her way across the slick floor to where Don was lying.

“You’ve made a mess of your clothes,” she commented, looking at him.

“I know,” he said. “They’re not mine anyway. They come with the crown.”

“Oh.”

Miel mumbled in her sleep, Don stroking her hair back as he examined her swollen eyelids, marks of just how exhausted she’d gotten before he’d crept her down here to let her sleep as she was accustomed. “She’s alone,” he said quietly. “Her family is gone and she never asked for this, not any of it. It’s not nice to be surrounded by people who are paid to be there and who don’t have the time to spare for you anyway, even if you’re submerged in luxury at the same time. It’s so isolating, to never hear another heartbeat. You start wondering if yours is the only one that beats at all.”

Nora, after a second, sat down beside him. He flinched for her gown, but didn’t say anything. He’d been too well trained by Daine, who’d ruined more gowns than she’d worn.

“We didn’t know what you’d say,” she said, which wasn’t an apology and Don refused to take it as one. “Don’t be mad at Savigny. He said we should tell you. It was my idea that your surprise would make it real, as though you were overwhelmed by feeling.”

Don, exhausted, snapped, “I _was_.”

Nora flinched.

“I just,” Don breathed, struggling to find the words. “Nora, you need to respect that I have so little in my life that’s real. Please. I have my animals. I have Daine, and Constant, and, sometimes, Solange. And I have Savigny. They are all off limits. Your schemes, your plots, whatever – I will support you in all of them, so long as you don’t take my reality from me. It’s just … so fragile.”

“What of this one?” asked Nora, touching Miel’s little hand with one finger and watching as the infant automatically closed her fist around it. “Where do you intend to place her, in your carefully constructed reality? We have no space for foundlings or confusion, Biscuit. It all falls apart unless we present the world with a single, undisputed heir.”

Don was annoyed by her presumptions.

“She’s a child with a plight I feel moved by,” he snapped. “I don’t know what you’re insinuating. I’ll do my duty to you.”

“Tonight?” Nora pressed, tilting her head as she examined him. He froze, his heart hammering so fast it was liable to wake the baby. “We are married now, husband. Our bed awaits us. An heir doesn’t grow on its own, after all.”

He couldn’t speak. His tongue was too thick in his mouth.

Nora sighed, flopping back on the damp stone with him. The stars above and the otters chirruping. The quiet sounds of Miel breathing. “That’s what I thought,” she said tersely. “Well, deal with it, Donatien. I don’t care if you need me to dress as Savigny to bed me, just figure it out. We don’t have much time. Until then, have your careful realities, your little fancies with orphans and forbidden men. I won’t touch them. But know that _I_ am your reality, in the end. Not Savigny, and not that girl. Me. We don’t get a pretty ending, Biscuit. People like us don’t. We just get our duty, and we do it, and then we die.”

“I know,” rasped Don. “I’ll figure it out, I promise. Somehow.”

Nora nodded. She didn’t question him further. They just lay there in uncertain silence, looking up at the stars above.

Nora, Don noticed, hadn’t taken her finger back.


	36. The Black God's Walk, Again

It was a month past the wedding. The mounting tensions in Galla had calmed into a cautious peace. Donatien’s gamble, as wild as it had sounded, was paying dividends for him. Unfortunately, for Numair, this meant wheels were turning back home.

The expression on George’s face was resolute and Numair was fuming at him for it.

“Our dear parents were very clear,” said George, leaning forward to try and seem sterner. Since Numair was sitting on the other side of a mirror that was propped below him, it wasn’t as effective as he was sure George wanted it to be. “All our Galla birdies are saying the same thing – that the king’s stunt with his wedding is working. Tensions are settling. And we need you on the road for home within the month.”

Numair loomed aggressively. “It’s quiet, not _settled,_ ” he stressed out, biting down on the trailing end of his inflections. “They’re still one thrown rock away from a bloody revolution. I need to stay here over winter, at least. Give me until spring.”

George was silent for a moment, the only sound the tapping of one finger on his desk as he thought that through. “Is that your opinion as Jon’s man, or as someone who doesn’t want to say goodbye to his beau just yet?” he asked.

Numair didn’t let it show how offensive he found that question. Silently damning Raoul in his thoughts – the gossip hadn’t even waited to be _home_ to tell everyone, he’d probably had pigeons in the air minutes after seeing Numair and Savigny embrace – he just stared. He’d found that as he was a man of many words, it said quite a bit when he refused to utilise them.

It worked. George winced.

“Apologies, Numair,” he said. “I know you do your duty to Tortall. But Jon has commanded you return, unless the country will topple in your absence. Can you honestly say it will?”

“I’m a passive source of information until the moment Jon sees fit to activate me,” said Numair quietly. “That’s how I work. I’m not one of your wiggly spies good for getting in all the cracks of Galla’s best kept secrets, and I’m not an agent provocateur. Is what I do not good enough for His Majesty anymore?”

George was frowning. His gaze skittered away from the mirror before returning, Numair refusing to adjust his end. George could look up his nose and be pleased with it. Numair saw the tiniest twitch of his head, a stalled shake. Someone was behind the mirror, communicating with George – and George wasn’t happy about it. There was only one person who could command George’s privacy like this.

“Alanna, come out.” Numair folded his arms, truly steaming now. He didn’t like being lied to. “What’s going on? Why the secrecy?”

There was a brief pause before Alanna stepped into frame, her expression grim. They didn’t bother with niceties.

“Jon said –” began George.

“Jon _suggested_ ,” snapped Alanna, her expression ruinous. “Suggestions can be disregarded, and I’m doing it. Numair, they’re recalling you because Carthak’s mad king is en-route to Cría. He’ll be there by winter.”

Numair, who had expected anything but this, went cold right from his brain to his toes. It was a soul-deep chill that had him trembling even though the temperature of the study was kept magically comfortable. Ozorne, here. Ozorne with Don. Ozorne near Daine, near Constant, near –

“He’s being escorted home by King Donatien’s advisor,” Alanna was continuing in a voice which implied this information was an afterthought, “some man named Cole. Do we know much about him? It doesn’t matter, anyway. Jon doesn’t want you there when Ozorne lands. It’s too risky right now, with him still calling for your death. Relations between Galla and Tortall are already grim enough without Jon having to demand compensation for Ozorne getting you beheaded.”

But Numair was still stuck on ‘Cole’.

Near Savigny, was the thought his brain finished. Oh, how all their nightmares were coming home to roost. This man who’d hurt Savigny so, and Ozorne …

“Why is he coming?” he asked bluntly.

“That odious fool Jon sent to treat with Donatien cocked the whole thing up,” said Alanna. She was so angry Numair was certain she was minutes from combustion. “Gallans are a bunch of haughty stick-asses and that absolute _wound_ of a man went and implied their king was a child-lo –”

George cut her off. “Political harm was done,” he said dryly. “Donatien has ‘politely’ declined Tortall’s assistance with food reserves.”

“He can’t afford to do that,” said Numair, his voice still quiet around the hoarseness in his throat.

“He can if he has other options.” George grimaced, looking exhausted. “We spent all this time worrying about a soft border meaning a clean sweep through a weakened Galla and into Tortall. Now because of our … error … in thinking Galla is nothing but a hurdle Carthak wants to leap, we’ve given Ozorne a rose-lined stroll into a country ready to make peace with him. We didn’t think Galla would be coy with us and that was stupid. That new queen of hers, this Alianora – she’s ready and willing to play international politics like her husband wouldn’t.”

Numair looked at his hands as he thought this through. It was a lot to take in. Knowing Ozorne was here set a fire in him to flee, to race for Tortall and not stop until he was back in his home by the Swoop. Far from Ozorne’s sword and the memory of his murdered lovers’ smiles. But he’d be leaving so many here, Sav and Don, Daine and Constant. Could he leave them to Ozorne’s mercy?

He knew he couldn’t.

“I can’t come home,” he said softly, ignoring Alanna’s furious exclamation. “I can’t. Someone has to be here to make sure Don knows who Ozorne is – someone has to make sure he doesn’t make Galla Carthak’s too. And I’m the only person who knows exactly how Ozorne works.”

Alanna looked, for a heartbreaking second, devastated. Then enraged. Then resigned.

“That,” she said, shoulders sagging, “is exactly why you can’t stay.”

But Numair already knew he would.

Numair went alone to the palace. Savigny was away on business for Hartholm Fief for most of the month – something Numair was glad for, so the man couldn’t see him at his most panicked as he considered Ozorne’s approach – with Daine spending time with Constant at the palace. Numair wasn’t going there for them though.

It took longer to be passed from hand to hand through the palace now than it had. Still, Numair was a recognisable face to the guards by now, and in due time he was presented to the room where Donatien was standing among an anxious crowd of clerks. Numair walked in, finding himself in a room positively brimming with scrolls and ledgers and desks groaning under the weight of both. At a glance as he passed, he saw that every scroll was covered with calculations and sums.

It seemed Donatien hadn’t been glib when he’d stated that an effective king was a king who knew his country’s finances. Numair was impressed. The man was surely in the thick of it here, and he doubted even Jon went so far as to rub elbows with clerks and accountants.

“Magisra,” Donatien greeted him, straightening from the ledger he was examining. There was ink on his fingers, and a smudge on his nose. If he hadn’t been so unsettled, Numair would have grinned at the sight. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

That was different, the way Donatien greeted him now. There was none of the livid hatefulness in the way he spoke of mages, his smile settling easier onto his mouth. It had only been a month since the wedding, some four months since they’d removed him from the fearwood’s influence, but finally Numair could see their efforts having an effect on the young king.

Not that it was helping the mages, in the end. Galla’s enemies had planned for the eventuality of their king’s recovery.

“A moment alone, majesty,” Numair asked, bowing.

Donatien nodded, taking his leave of the clerks. “We’ll go to the mews,” he said before Numair could speak as they stepped into the hall. “No one will bother us there, except perhaps Daine and Constant.”

Numair acquiesced. They walked without hurry, speaking of small pleasantries: Constant’s studies, Daine’s wellbeing, Savigny’s travels. They didn’t speak of digging Savigny out of the earth, or Donatien’s lingering mind-troubles, or of the curfew that had fallen thick and foreboding over the lower cities.

At the mews, Donatien dismissed both servants and guards, taking Numair to view his birds as the room emptied. The mews were a long building with separate enclosures, a great tower attached to one end. As Donatien explained, until they were alone, this was to provide them with areas for the more territorial birds to be without rivals rather than the more traditional tower loft where they’d perch shoulder to shoulder with other birds. It meant less injuries from skirmishes.

The door closed behind the last guard.

Donatien prowled the length of the room, looking through each windowed door in on the bird or birds kept within. Numair watched, noting how the birds in their cabin-like enclosures seemed quite calm, most dozing on their perches. It was Donatien, walking among them like a jailer, who seemed caged.

“Are you quite well, majesty?” Numair asked. He used a voice which implied he was asking after something as innocuous as the weather, but since descending into the earth together to pluck Daine and Savigny from its clutches, there was an understanding between them. A trust, even, built on shared secrets and a dark knowing of each other. Numair knew Donatien’s bond with Savigny ran deeper than either of them had ever let on, deep enough to break his kinghood for good; Don knew that Numair would rip the world apart to save those he loved.

“I’m less scattered,” said Donatien in a tone which implied he was distracted, at odds with the point of his words. “It helps that she helps take the weight of ruling. I see much clearer with her at my side, especially now it’s been made so eminently clear how much power my loyalists have stripped from me during my illness. I am glad for her.”

Numair noted his distancing.

“By her I presume you mean the queen,” he said carefully, noting with a sinking heart the way Donatien flinched. The whole gamble hinged on the people’s belief in their monarchs’ love. Numair had hoped that, maybe with time, something would grow …

But it had only been a month, he reminded himself.

“Yes,” said Don without emotion. Then he paused, turning to give Numair an odd look. Numair waited. “Cole once spoke to me of a spell that allows a body to undertake an action without the mind’s knowing. Do you know of a spell like this?”

That hadn’t been at all what Numair had expected. “Yes,” he said, disliking the fierce interest now lighting up Donatien’s attention. “But they’re not to be meddled with lightly, especially not by someone – Don, consider how much trouble we’ve already had with malicious powers meddling in your mind. That’s what the spell is, at its core. Someone’s Gift in your mind.”

“But if it’s a mage I trust?” Don asked. Now, Numair could hear the desperation. “I wouldn’t ask anyone else, Numair. But you, I can trust you. Or Sav – no, not Savigny. I couldn’t ask Savigny.”

Numair stared dumbly at him. It was true that with every day that passed, Donatien seemed less and less the terrified, recalcitrant king who’d tried to ban the Gifted; but there were still mage laws on the books, and a curfew on the city, and taxes on Gifted households. It seemed absurd that Don could trust a mage _that_ much, unless …

“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t have the ability. My Gift is too strong, and I’ve no interest in those arts anyway. I can’t imagine what act should be so terrible you’d need your mind quelled to undertake it anyway.” He paused, reaching delicately for the words he needed. “Is all well with the queen?”

It was far politer than the underlying question of ‘how goes the creation of an heir?’ Numair, who lived with Savigny, had become very cautious about how he approached the topic of Donatien’s bedding his wife. Everyone at the Hartholm estate had learned to be. Daine had been glib just once about the topic and Savigny had thrown his mug through a priceless stained-glass window; Daine, once Savigny had stormed out, had said it was a very good statement on Sav’s ironclad control over his temper. Had he not been so controlled, she’d continued, the mug would have likely been at her, and then she would have had to throw it back twice as hard. Numair still didn’t understand their relationship.

Don grimaced, though he tried to turn it into a smile.

“We’re very happy and I love her very much,” he monotoned. Numair hoped he attempted a sliver more enthusiasm to audiences who didn’t know the political nature of the coupling. “Never mind that. It was a silly whim. I have no need of any magic. Why are you here?”

Numair returned to the topic at hand, making a mental note to mention this odd conversation to Savigny before Donatien went and found someone without Numair’s scruples to fulfill his request. Savigny would talk sense into the man. “Your advisor, Cole –”

“Magisra,” corrected Donatien softly, though his tone was firm. “You’re foreign, I know, but Savigny should have taught you terms of respect. He is a great man.”

Numair’s heart sunk.

He continued, though more carefully now. Treading over fine ice. “Magisra Cole,” he began, and then froze. He’d been a fool. He’d tripped right into his friendship with Savigny, forgetting in his idiocy that this man in front of him was the king of Galla, not Sav, not Daine, not Jon – and how could Numair tell him he knew his advisor was returning home with the Emperor of Carthak, who was a fiend? His panic had driven him here, white hot and dazzling, and he was inches away from declaring himself a spy to a foreign king.

Don was watching him curiously.

Then he smiled, that smile revealing more exhaustion than he’d shown yet.

“Be out with it, Salmalín,” he said, leaning against a wall and tipping his head back to rest against the wood. “I know you’ve your king’s ear. When I’m well, I’m not a fool, and the Tortallans are worried Galla poses a threat to them. Of course my dear cousin has eyes on me.”

Numair blinked. “Cousin?” he parroted.

“Probably,” said Donatien with a shrug. “I’m certain we are, though that part of my lessons on lineage was always reluctantly covered. Galla has no fond memories of interbreeding with Tortall. The lineage of royals does tend to create circlets rather than trees – there isn’t a noble in Galla I couldn’t claim some level of shared blood with. Why do you think many were so enthused about my marrying into Maren? We’re a very small, very secluded country isolated at the top of the world with nobility who see raising heirs in the same light as whelping hounds. Marriages have very rarely extended our reach down into the lowlands.”

“So you’d have been related to Kalasin, anyway,” murmured Numair thoughtfully, which earned another shrug.

“Extremely distantly.” Don’s tone sharpened as they verged close to the topic of the Tortallan princess. “For what it matters, I’ve a cleaner marriage now than I would with near on anyone else in the upper echelon, barring Daine if we wish to be lenient on the definition of ‘nobility’. But you didn’t come here to discuss family matters. Tell me your concerns.”

“Magisra Cole returns home on a fast ship,” said Numair, heart beating dully at the fixed attention on Donatien’s face. “He’s accompanied by the Emperor of Carthak.”

“Ozorne?” Don, to Numair’s muddled relief, sounded shocked. He hadn’t invited Ozorne’s advances. “What possible reason does Ozorne have for attending Galla? That’s almost a month at sea, not to mention the weeks overland – if they travel light. We’ve no treaties with them, no possible reason for …” He trailed off, eyes narrowing. “And what does Tortall think of our esteemed guest?”

“Carthak is no friend of Tortall,” Numair answered, choosing his words with care. “I have personal experience with Ozorne, specifically. He seeks power over all and sees his dominion over others as a Gods-given right. If he comes to Galla, it’s not to offer friendship, even if that’s how he presents it.”

Donatien watched Numair without his gaze shifting. It wasn’t as piercing as Jon’s stare could be, but Numair shifted uncomfortably under it anyway. It was how aware it was now that rattled him; he’d become somewhat used to Don’s expression being dazed.

“Tortall is no friend of Galla,” was Don’s grim response. “I’ve no reason to belief in Conte’s affirmations that he only wishes to feed my people. You say that Carthak desires dominion, insinuating a potential annexation of Gallan land? You must see how far-fetched that is. Depending on the direction Carthak marched to reach us, they’d be marching through Sarain, who despise them, or the insular duchies of Tyra and Tusaine –”

“Maren,” Numair said quietly.

“– or Maren who are a disparate collection of squabbling territories with too many princes and not enough land to house them. Perhaps some of Maren side with Carthak’s wealth, but in my experience the only thing _all_ of Maren agrees on is that there are too many princes in Maren. To claim Galla for himself would be an absurd feat for even the Emperor Mage – yes, don’t look so surprised, I do know of his reputation. What part of a _small,_ isolated country did not give you the impression that I’m aware of our limited military options?”

Numair was surprised, but perhaps he shouldn’t have been. Since he’d arrived in Galla, in between those who called him a child and a fool, and those who called him mad, there had been those few select voices who’d warned that Donatien knew his country.

“Now,” said Don, “let’s speak of Tortall. Tortall who colonised the lands of the Bazhir, who aggressively shift the Scanran border whenever Scanra weakens economically and can no longer afford to waste bodies upon defending it. As a point of interest, you should visit our libraries, Salmalín. We have copies of maps within that might fascinate you, especially how the Gallan marked maps differ so dramatically from those that Tortall produces on the true position of Scanra’s edges. A greedy Carthak is alarming, and I would bet even more so for countries with coastal borders. But for Galla, who is hemmed in by all her squabbling sisters, who do you think I fear more? Carthak’s blunted teeth nipping at Tortall’s skirts, or Tortall’s hungry eyes turning up to the mountains and realising that while Galla is small and silly … Numair, we are _prosperous._ We have mountains thick with ores and fields so fertile you can grow the most tempestuous riches upon them. Tortall wants our fields which grow spices and dyes despite our savage winters. Her knights want our steel for their swords, and her lords want our quarries for their grand castles. Her king wants our golds and silvers and jewels. Do you think my lords hate the idea of a Tortallan match because of petty rivalry? Tortall has been taking bites out of us for centuries. You come here and tell me that Ozorne of far-away Carthak is a threat to my kingdom, yet all Tortall has ever offered Galla is insult and harried borders. And they are a _far_ greater threat. Your dear king, my cousin Jonathan, don’t think for a moment that he hasn’t pondered taking all his pretties knights and clever mages and sweeping up to claim my mountains as his own. If you doubt me, perhaps you should take a daytrip down to our borders without declaring yourself to your people. See what the Tortallans do there, to _my_ people, who didn’t ask to be nibbled at.”

Silence fell, one in which Numair felt both incensed at the implications of Donatien’s spiel, yet also remarkably uncomfortable.

“Tortall guards the borders because it fears an incursion from Carthak through a weakened Galla,” Numair said finally, hating how stiff his intonation sounded. “I know Savigny has spoken to you of this.”

“So I was assured, and perhaps this is true,” Don agreed, “though I would be astounded if the momentous cost of establishing a hard inland border wasn’t being slightly tempered by reconnaissance by Tortall. If their possession of the border doesn’t serve a multitude of purposes, then your king is a fool. But that hardly makes my injured people feel any kinder towards them. Tell me, in your personal experience of Ozorne, why would he not have announced his coming? An absolute monarch riding into another’s lands is … it’s a unique move, certainly. I wouldn’t be blamed if I construed it as an act of invasion. Your king certainly would if I strolled into Corus with a retinue of my finest.”

Numair took a moment to think about it. It was hard to think through his unease, the sounds of birds around him battling for his attention. Before he could truly attend, the doors opened to allow Daine and Constant entry, the dogs at their heels, though Don gestured to them to close the doors firmly again and not to speak.

“I’m waiting,” pressed Don, who clearly didn’t mind if his companions heard this conversation.

“What have you done to him?” Daine asked Don, frowning in Numair’s direction. “I’ve never seen him so sore for words.” Don didn’t answer, still watching Numair, who was still struggling to articulate just how terrifying a creature Ozorne could be without giving up his whole sordid past with the man. “Don, Nora’s looking for you. She’s got it in her head that you’re to ride through the city today to celebrate the harvest.”

“Mm? Oh, yes. Darragon filled four of our grain stores alone.” Don hadn’t shifted his gaze. Numair felt savaged by it. “It’s worthy of celebration. We’ll be on rations this winter, perhaps, but well on our way to recovery. Constant, go see that the guard is ready, and prepare my horse for me. Have Rainary check the men. Perhaps see to the queen’s horse too – I know you’re no stable hand but –”

“I know,” said Constant, giving Numair a curious look before whistling Bon Bon to him. Earnest had danced his doggy way over to Don and seemed inclined to stay, working on covering Don’s dark hose with white fluff as he rubbed on him like a cat. “I’ll doublecheck the tack.”

He vanished.

“I’m still waiting,” Don reminded Numair, who gave up.

“I don’t know,” he confessed. “Ozorne –” Daine’s eyes widened. “– is a slippery man. He’ll come offering friendship, I’ve no doubt, and he’s so very good at being charming it will feel absolutely sincere. But to do that, surely he would have announced his coming first … a surprise arrival does nothing for him, or for you, and I’ve no idea what he has planned. But I know he’s dangerous and, for what it’s worth, I’m afraid of him, Don. I’m terrified of him being here.”

Don’s gaze, for only an instant, softened.

“Thank you for telling me,” he said. “I’ll take care. Daine, Numair, will you ride with us?”

“Where are we riding?” Daine asked, though she was trying to bore a hole into Numair’s skull with her stare as though she could see what had transpired from sheer force of will. Numair wasn’t sure she was even paying attention to the question. He stared back, trying to tell her ‘not now’ with his eyes, though he wasn’t sure it was working. They needed a better way to communicate.

“The Bog,” said Don breezily, as though it cost him nothing at all to say.

Daine rode so close to Numair that Sugar and Ginger, the horses, were in danger of treading on each other’s hooves. She kept up a non-stop pestering for information that drove Numair batty, considering where they were and what they were doing.

They rode through the Inner City in a cobbled together procession that was causing Numair great anxiety by refusing to form into a well-organised and therefore _safer_ parade. It was one thing for the young royals to ride gloriously down into their people, looking happy and in love – Don, it turned out, was a far better actor when he needed to be than when he was alone – but entirely another for whatever this was. Nora kept dismounting from her horse and walking to greet people by name, milling pleasantly among the people with Don lingering awkwardly overhead, still horsed. The guards stuck as close to her as they could, and Numair watched the ones covering Donatien anxiously, but the disarray of the thing meant there were so many gaps, so many openings …

A small retinue of nobles and their servants had come too, some staying upon their horses and looking down with disdain at Nora accepting a flower from a little boy and crouching to let him kiss her cheek. Fewer dismounted and joined Nora with the other children who were running forward for their own attention from the queen now. Numair was sure he could learn a lot here, had he not been so worried he was about to witness an assassination.

“Why is _Ozorne_ coming?” Daine hissed, her horse bumping into Numair’s again and almost sending him toppling into a bakery stall. “Have you told Don what he did to you? He’s mad! If you won’t tell Don, tell _Sav_. You can’t let him come here!”

“We’ll speak when we’re home,” Numair hissed back. Nora was back on her horse, finally, and they were moving again. Slowly and surely heading towards the Bog, which was a _mistake._ “Daine, can’t you talk Don out of this? The curfew has everyone tense. They won’t welcome him down there.”

Daine, distracted, glanced after her brother as they moved their horses into a walk to follow the procession. “He won’t listen,” she said, frowning.

“We tried,” Constant’s voice piped up, his horse surging forward to catch up. “He won’t listen. He keeps saying Nora’s right, that they’ve got to be seen by the people so everyone believes they’re fighting for them. I don’t think he trusts his own feelings anymore, not even now he’s feeling better.”

Bon Bon trotted elegantly by his mount’s spotted side, looking glorious beside her large equine cousin. Earnest, seven months old and still more fur than fat, was a ball of white fur and two beady eyes peering out of a large basket latched to the saddle. He probably had the energy and the gumption to keep up with the horses, but Numair knew that though the dog was very enthusiastic, he wasn’t quite the smartest bean in the pot. Daine had banned him from running alongside the horses, due to his grand distractions. Now, his head upside-down as he gazed sadly at everything he could be licking and all the horses he could be madly sprinting through the legs of, he gave a great big sigh.

“They’ll have guards out,” Daine said, though she was biting nervously at her lip. “If too many people gather, they’ll disperse them.”

That, thought Numair with a shudder, was exactly what he was afraid of.

He wished Savigny was here.

Still, they made it through the city to the Lowest City’s gates without disaster. As they went, even Numair begrudgingly had to admit that Nora had a point. The people loved seeing her, their common queen come down among them. It was one thing to marry Don to a commoner, but they’d quickly lose any ground they’d gained if they then kept her locked away from those who loved the idea of her. All the little girls and boys who flooded out to gaze wide-eyed at the queen of their kingdom, who’d once baked them bread in her stained apron, covered in flour and sugar. All the tradespeople who looked to her and saw the illusion of upwards movement. And it _was_ an illusion, Numair thought glumly – how many people truly broke through the walls that kept the poor from the rich, without some great, gods-given skill like magic or genius?

Donatien, mostly, was ignored, except for when Nora made him dismount with her and – hand in hand – walked him over to a group of children who held up strings of woven flowers. Numair and Daine, lurking in the back of the procession, watched silently as Don crouched to let a boy set a chain of ivy into his hair, the boy blushing so fiercely he looked liable to burst.

“I forget how much he likes children,” said Daine thoughtfully, watching as the children – who gazed in awe at their king like no one else did – crowded him for attention, which he gladly gave. Nora had retreated, letting him boggart their affection. “It’s not an act, how he is with them. He’s better with them than any bag I know.”

Numair thought of the little orphan girl, Miel. He nodded to show he was listening. But he was thinking of what Don had asked, about a spell to enable a mindless act …

“That must be a small pleasure to him then,” he commented idly, “knowing he’ll have an heir of his own to spoil soon.”

Daine frowned, looked down at her horse’s mane.

Surprisingly, it was Constant who spoke.

“I don’t think it’ll be that easy,” he murmured, his voice so low that Numair barely heard him. He was hardly moving his lips, his attention on Earnest so that any who glanced at him would think he was speaking to the hound. “Don’s like me. He doesn’t like bedding. He’s … struggling.”

“He’s grown,” said Daine. “That changes the way you think about bedding. When you’re our age you’ll –”

“No,” said Constant with placid certainty. “It’s not like that. It’s like, Savigny told me he knew he desired men when he was ten. As he got older, he decided maybe he could like both, but he _knew_ he preferred them much earlier. I’ve asked. There’s plenty of people who know early who they are and who they want. I don’t like bedding and I don’t desire like that. I know it as surely as Savigny knew. Don’s not so certain of anything, and he won’t tell me what happens in their chambers, but I know that the only way he goes to her during the night now is when he’s too silly with wine to stand. He can’t bear it otherwise. I think I’d be the same.”

Numair swore softly under his breath. Galla needed an heir, and Numair knew there was only so long he’d be able to dodge Jon’s commands to return home. By the turn of spring, he’d be gone, too far away to know what fate befell Galla and the people here he loved.

“That doesn’t make sense,” said Daine, shaking her head. “He courted _Savigny_. Don’t pull that face, Constant, you brought it up – I’ve seen you and Sav, Numair. You’d put cats to shame with your carousing.”

“Well, said Numair awkwardly. The gates were opening and they were readying to ride through, the tension in his spine straightening him in the saddle as he saw glimpses of the Bog through the gates. None of the guards look happy. “They were younger, then.”

But he was thinking of the first time he’d been with Savigny. What had the man said?

 _I crave touch, not completion_.

Blast, thought Numair. A childless king could be worked around. A childless king of Galla, as it was right now? With Ozorne on the doorstep and with hungry eyes on the throne?

If this got out, everything they’d worked for would burn.

“Tell no one what you’ve told us today,” he said to Constant as they passed the gates into the unnerving quiet of the Bog. “Who else knows?”

“No one,” said Constant, giving Numair a wry look. “I’m not silly, Numair. I’ve made sure it stays within the bedroom.”

He really had grown up, thought Numair sadly. He missed his excitable student, vanished into the palace and leaving behind this stern-eyed, suspicious smaller Savigny. It didn’t really seem fair that Constant had retained his innocence so long, only to lose it within six months of serving.

“Where do we ride for?” he asked, letting his voice fall back into its usual tones as though they’d been conversing quite normally.

“The lower grain stores,” Constant replied, settling firmer into his saddle. For all their protestations that this was safe and needed, there was no more dismounting happening. The procession had formed into even lines, the guards three strong around them. They rode slowly by intently towards their goal. “They’re going to personally witness the reserves, to assure all that it will be a tight winter, but not a starved one.

Through most of the Bog, that meant. Numair grimaced, nodded, and settled into his own saddle – trying not to think of Raven, and her mages, and the palace guard who, to a man, possessed no Gifts.

But nothing happened. They visited the grain stores. Don bestowed the blessing of the king’s hand upon it. Both he and Nora spoke at length with the temple priests who oversaw the safety of the stores, agreeing to divide the Jewel’s fourth store further to add to this one. They rode from there to a children’s home, where the afternoon passed with them speaking to the young ones there. Daine thought it was a political move, to be seen cosseting babies when adults starved on the street, but Numair remembered the children of the Inner City, and how Don had doted, and knew that – in some way – Donatien understood that there were adults he’d never convince of his change. The children, though, the children would one day be adults, and Mithros allowing Donatien would still be their king, and it would serve Don well to have them think fondly of him.

From there, they rode to the wreckage of the Red Temples. They paid their respects, not just to the temple men and women who’d died, and the city guards who’d fallen while trying to save those trapped in the rubble, but also to the people of the surrounding homes and businesses. Don spoke to the gathered crowd at length of rebuilding, of bringing forth life from ruin – and the whole time, Numair noticed, he held Nora’s hand in his, and she watched him carefully, and his voice never wavered.

And nothing happened. Though people gathered, and people of all levels of Bog life from the merchants to the beggars, no one called abuse. No one threw stones. No mages appeared, livid with rage, no one chanted their rulers’ names. They came, and they listened, and each and every one of them appeared thoughtful. Tired, yes. Unhappy. A crowd of blue-painted cheeks and downturned mouths, looking up at those who rode above them. The horses they rode which were better fed than they were, those who’d had to consider eating their own mounts to survive.

But nothing happened.

And Numair felt hope that something could change, even if it was hard.

“It’s too quiet,” Daine said as they turned for home, the sun beginning to droop down the cloudy sky. It became cold fast, now summer was well and truly fading. Cloaks and furs were being pulled tight around shoulders and arms. “No one here fears the palace or the city guards, but they still seem … afraid. Muted. Why aren’t they speaking their minds?”

She was talking of the people, who still lingered in lines and blobby congregations along the streets, wordlessly watching the tired nobles pass.

“Maybe they’re waiting to see what Nora makes of their king,” Numair suggested. He glanced up to the royals, who were having a hissed disagreement through their careful smiles. “What are they discussing?”

Constant, who’d ridden up to them, dropped back, though he couldn’t have heard Numair’s question. “Nora wants to see the Black God’s Walk,” he said, Numair shivering to remember the ghostly street filled with motley memories. “Don’s resisting. She thinks it will show that they aspire to atone for the harm they’ve caused, by first acknowledging past harms.”

“She can’t take Don there,” Daine said, so tense in her saddle that Sugar began to toss her head, picking up on her rider’s anxiety. “It’s one thing to make him come here and see his people – she can’t force him to watch his mother’s murder again. That’s monstrous. Doesn’t she care at all for his heart?”

Constant gave Daine a dull look. “I don’t know what makes you think she does,” he said.

Numair winced again.

Unhappily, considering how sore they were feeling and how the dark had begun to fall faster, the procession turned towards the walk. Numair was truly unhappy now. They were dangerously close to flaunting the curfew that curtailed the Bog’s citizens, showing just how wide the divide between Jewel and Bog was. Any goodwill they’d gathered by agreeing to share the Jewel’s stores with the Lowest City would dissipate if they galloped through with no heed for the laws that kept the people here locked at home, for fear of the king’s law falling upon them. Not to mention the dark, and the eerie quiet of the watching people, and the expression on Don’s face which was absolutely not the expression of someone deeply in love with his wife. He looked gaunt and terrified, like a man walking to his execution.

Numair’s horse shied, reacting to his tight grip on the reins. He loosened his hands, but it was a battle. Every muscle was taut with tension. He felt hyperaware, his ears buzzing from how hard he was focusing them. Listening for any possible sound that could indicate danger, his gaze sweeping the streets, taking in the people, the skittish guards, the nervous nobles. He was trying to peer down every empty alleyway, scan every rooftop, look at every waiting –

He jerked his head around, back to the alley they’d passed where he could have sworn he’d seen the corner of a raven-beaked mask watching. It was empty. That didn’t mean anything. They were close to the walk. Somehow, the news of their approach had spread ahead of them; the biggest crowd of the night was here, despite the curfew, despite the oncoming dark. Children, men, women, guards, merchants; Numair looked at their faces and saw not the suspicious curiosity of the former Bog crowds. There was something happening here. He felt sick with the anticipation.

Daine goaded her horse to Don’s side, Numair following. Don was shaking so hard it was visible even in the dark, his lips stark against his rapidly paling face. Battleshock, Numair thought, glancing sideways at Constant, who set a steadying hand on Don’s elbow. The king was slipping into a panic. Their horses were uneasy. Numair had no idea how they’d ride them down the street.

“We can’t dismount,” said Nora softly to them as they rode to her, her eyes on the people. “Daine, can you keep the horses from bolting when the magic activates?”

Daine was silent for a moment. “Yes,” she rasped, eventually. “But, Majesty, I beg of you … don’t take Don down there. Look at him.”

“He needs to face his fear,” said Nora coldly. Don hadn’t said a word. The crowd was murmuring; the horses fidgeted and snorted; the guards armour was a constant background noise as they paced. The nobles whispered to themselves, their own faces tight with nerves. “His people need to see him suffer for them.”

“She’s right,” Don managed, his voice thin. “Daine, keep the horses calm. Constant, by me.”

And he urged his horse forward, his horse’s hooves the first to sound on the cobbles of the white-and-black nightmare street. Constant hurried after him, Bon Bon slinking after with her tail between her legs and her ears back. Earnest had vanished into the basket, hiding his head. Daine followed, Nora inches behind. And, like a dam bursting, the rest of the nobles followed.

Numair didn’t. He dismounted, handing his reins to Rainary as she passed and ignoring her curious glance. Alone and on foot, separate from the rest of the procession, he walked to the side of the street, watching them making their slow way through the illusionary carnage. From here, he couldn’t see how Don was handling the terror; but he could see how the people were slowly beginning to trickle onto the street well behind the procession, parents carrying children as they pointed to the men and women who’d died here, in the riots. Numair wondered what they were telling them, the stories they told of this place. He wondered how many of them were being given the courage to come here for the first time tonight, following in their king’s footsteps.

Mostly, he felt tired and unhappy, torn between recognising Nora’s pragmatism and aching for Don’s fear. He didn’t know what to feel anymore.

He slipped down an alley, walking alone. Circling behind the buildings, away from the illusions, until he found a ladder set gently against a wall. Someone who climbed it, they’d look over the street, with a grand few of those who walked below. There were people standing guard at the foot of the ladder, but Numair didn’t falter. He knew them.

“Where is she?” he asked coldly.

Nonny went to speak, but Numair cut them off. He had no time for this one. He turned to Remy, raised his eyebrows, and went to walk to the ladder.

“Back off, mage,” Remy warned gently, though she was fonder of him than she had been before the burning of the Red Temple.

Numair sighed, muttered to himself, and gathered his Gift. The expressions on their faces as he lifted himself up to the rooftops would have been funny, had he been in the mood to laugh.

Raven, of course, was perched up there, watching those below with a crossbow loaded on her knee. Numair tensed.

“Don’t scowl at me, pretty mage,” said Raven without looking at him. “I’m not here to harm your darling king. Why do you think this little caper has been so peaceful?”

“I knew someone was behind it,” Numair confessed, coming to a crouch beside her and looking down. He could see the nobles on their horses, moving slowly, and the people moving faster around them, milling together like ants. And, everywhere, the ghostly shapes of those frozen deaths. “I didn’t expect you and yours, though. I’d have thought you’d be one of those looking to cause them harm, or at least to frighten them like you did at Beltane.”

“We’ve no reason to scare him right now,” was Raven’s response. “He acts in our interests.”

“The curfew?” Numair queried, curious as to how much Raven knew.

“Not his, if that was a test,” she responded tartly. “And I’m intrigued by this dance he has going on with the baker’s get. His audacity may be the salvation of us yet.”

Numair side-eyed her, hoping for a hint of what she was truly thinking, but the mask foiled him. “And what do you think of this?” he asked, gesturing to the street. He was aware of Raven suddenly tensing beside him; he followed the eyeline of her mask and saw that Don had reached his mother’s death. Quiet had fallen. “And that,” he added.

Raven didn’t answer. She was rigid.

Numair couldn’t bear looking down at this scene, seeing the way Don was barely hunched into his saddle. His imagination would rip him apart, imagining how it would feel to see the worst memory of one’s life in such horrendous detail. He looked away, scanning the street.

“That’s foolish,” he said with a frown. Raven was still watching Don. “If you’re not aiming to scare him, why have people visibly masked?”

“What?” Raven asked, shivering back into attention beside him. She glanced down into the crowd, following Numair’s gaze to where he’d seen masks dotted here and there among the people who’d followed the nobles into the crowd. “Who – Nonny!”

Nonny appeared at the top of the ladder, Raven launching up. Numair staggered up too, brilliantly aware of the targets they made up there.

“They’re not ours!” hissed Raven tossing the crossbow at Nonny, who took her place. “Don’t let them get to the king!”

Nonny pulled a face but took Raven’s place, Raven bolting past and leaping for the next roof. Shocked into action, Numair hurtled after her – but she was far, far faster than he was as she leapt down into the alley and vanished along her own paths, and he had to think quickly. If they weren’t Raven’s, and they were masked, they were a danger. Among the crowd, hidden in the illusions, he’d lose clear sight.

He turned and, using his Gift, leapt across alleys and divisions between houses, keeping close to the street. At every moment conscious of the shifting slate below his feet and the possibility he was about to leap straight through a weakened roof of the abandoned buildings, but desperate to get a clear line of sight on Don, Daine, and Constant.

The one he found nearest to them was lower than he’d wanted, Numair sliding his way across the sloped slate until he could look directly down upon the king and queen. All seemed calm there, and he breathed easier, glancing along the street and seeing no masks, no Raven, no panic. Perhaps Raven had moved faster than he, and –

Crossbows weren’t a quiet weapon. Numair heard the clank of the gear engaging even from houses away, twitching towards the sound before his brain registered what the bolt had done. The body appeared quite suddenly three arm’s lengths away from Nora’s horse, jerking into existence with the bolt through its eye before it fell into a motionless heap. Blood pooled on the white and black stone. People turned, curious, unguarded, startled. The bolt had smashed through the mask and into the eye, but they could all still see the killing knife the person held, and see the dark clothes, and know exactly what this person had been aiming to do.

Illusions, thought Numair, sagged with a brief and thrilling horror. Gallans used illusions.

Oh, what a _fool_ he was today.

Don’s mount reared, screaming, a slash appearing across its chest. Constant shrieked when he saw it and, as the other horses scrabbled in their attempts to get away, he charged his horse forward, the sickening sound of hooves on flesh sounding as an invisible person screamed with pain. Numair saw the body appeared under Thibault’s hooves, jerking spasmodically as the horse’s weight crushed it, and then chaos ignited. Guards scrambled for the monarchs; the illusionary deaths still swayed in place; the dogs were barking; nobles screamed and shouted, grabbing their own weapons out as their horses threatened to bolt right into the too-clustered crowds of baffled innocents.

Numair was fairly unable to react using his Gift, as anything he could do would trap allies as well as foes – and from here, he could see the danger of trying to freeze to scene. There was no guarantee he’d be able to hold them all, especially the horses, who were mad with the stink of blood. He couldn’t see how many assailants were down there …

But he could reveal them.

Numair sent his Gift down in a great gust, sweeping across the scene and ripping all illusions from those who carried them. None of them had been prepared for this, and there was a beat of shocked horror as they realised they were visible before the guards responded by crashing down upon them. It also, unfortunately, revealed just how close they’d gotten.

Daine screamed as a sword slashed at her from a masked figure who’d been crouched beside her horse. Numair, briefly, wondered why her horse hadn’t warned her, before he realised how impossible a task that would been even for a horse in the chaos of the battle. About to risk a broken ankle by flinging himself down there, Numair saw Constant gallop up beside her and use the momentum of his horse to bring his booted foot into the side of the attacker’s head, the sword missing its target.

This backfired, the person reeling around and grabbing Constant’s foot, wrenching him from the saddle and down into the mess of hooves and fighting, Daine seeing him go with her eyes widening –

“Don’t!” yelled Numair, catching himself with his Gift as he flung himself over the edge and down there, keeping above the crowd by catching a lower wall and trying to grab Constant with his Gift from there. He knew as soon as he was swallowed by the crowd, he’d lose his ability to see what was happening. And he also knew that she was going to –

She did it. She was half wolf before she was even out of the saddle, vanishing from his sight with a screaming howl that finished off whatever sanity the horses had; they bolted, all of them, people’s screams rising in pitch as they were trampled or thrown. The only person who managed to keep his seat, and horse, in the horror of that moment was Don, who was horribly, openly twisted out of his saddle as he wrenched the bridle of Nora’s mount down, stopping it from bolting. Numair, half trying desperately to spot where the wolf-Daine had gone, and where Constant was, saw that too, how vulnerable the king was as he kept his wife’s horse calm. Barely seated, torso open, both hands engaged away from the sword at his hip. And Numair knew; he had to decide now whether to go for Daine and Constant, lost in the scrum of masks and guards, or if he went for the royals.

Several of the assassins had managed to pull their illusions back, vanishing from sight. Guards fell, slashed by invisible foes. Numair heard a dog yelping.

And he lost his temper.

With a roar, he slammed his Gift across the street again, this time stripping it of all over Gifts. The illusions vanished, snuffed out of existence. The assassins appeared again, this time more of them, those that Numair hadn’t revealed before he’d thrown his all into it. Some turned to look at him, although most realised the danger they were in as they recognised his power and turned to flee.

There was one. Numair, in that breathless moment of absolute rage, met that one’s eyes. They were behind Donatien. They were raising a throwing knife. From that distance, they couldn’t miss.

Numair raised his arm, panicked, frantic, desperate, as Don’s mount stepped nervously back, taking him closer, and Don had calmed Nora’s horse and was straightening, calling to his guards, standing in the saddle as he roared, _to me_. Between Numair and the assassin, and Numair screamed –

Raven appeared from the scrum, one hand wrapped around Constant’s arm, popping up below Nora’s mount like a ghast. She reached up and grabbed the queen’s arm, ripping her from the saddle as the throwing knife flicked overhead. The queen tumbled ungracefully to the ground, in danger of being trampled but Raven slapped the flat of her blade against the horse’s rump and it half-reared and galloped forward instead, ripping the reins from Don’s hands. Just for a moment, the king and Raven stood before each other, Raven masked, sword in hand, standing over the motionless body of the queen with Constant gripped in her other hand. The assassin who’d thrown the knife was dead, but Numair couldn’t see how.

And then Numair realised just what Donatien would have seen in the chaos. His wife ripped from her horse. Constant bloodied and limp. The rebel who wanted the king dead, standing over them, and no one else nearby to explain the horror.

“No!” screamed Numair, leaping into the quietening chaos and running, though he knew he wasn’t going to make it, to stop what he knew was about to happen –

– Don had his sword in his hand, roaring with rage –

– Raven stumbled back, trying to get out of range, but Constant’s legs tangled with hers and she lost her balance –

– the sword slashed –

– “No!” someone else screamed, all the animals screaming too, Don’s horse rearing –

– the swing missed Raven’s chest, where it had been aiming to run her through, and instead lashed up, through the mask as though the raven-beak wasn’t even there –

– and blood sprayed hot and viscous, onto the belly of the frantic horse. Raven sagged, her knees buckling and something that they couldn’t see, her throat or her face, opened by the king’s sword. It pumped freely. That scream again and Numair was staring into the woman’s eyes, through that illusionary mask that only now was he realising didn’t actually exist, feeling the wavering flicker of her Gift as she registered how bad the slash was. And, for the briefest moment, seeing those eyes. Seeing how she looked at him. The surprise and the horror. Maybe she’d known she could die, but she hadn’t realised it was today.

And then the real horror hit him.

Raven turned and ran, as fast on her feet as though she wasn’t losing life’s blood on the cobblestone road. Don hadn’t given chase; he’d half tumbled from his saddle and was crouched beside Nora, one hand on Constant, and turning to scream at Daine as she leapt past, “Why’d you do that! I _had_ her!”

But Daine ignored him, sprinting after Raven, and then Numair was running too and the guards hadn’t seen so they weren’t following, they didn’t know, and it was just Daine and Numair and the trail of blood and they weren’t going to catch her, not like this, so Numair grabbed Daine’s arm and hauled her back on her bare feet, feeling her naked and trembling against him as she fought to be free, fought like a demon, writhing and snarling in his arms as she howled, “No! Let me _go,_ he’s hurt, he’s _hurt_.”

Numair knew. He didn’t know when he’d realised, but it had been in one of the dizzying, horrible moments between seeing the sword fall and the way Raven had looked at him with those shocked, green eyes.

“I know,” he whispered, pulling her close and wrapping his cloak around her. There was so much blood on her and he didn’t know whose it was. “I know, magelet. We’ll find him.”

Daine collapsed into his arms and began, ruthlessly, to cry.

They limped home fairly unscathed, all things considering. Numair knew it was because Raven’s people had leapt into the fray to take down the assassins before they could hurt anyone, but he also knew that many of Raven’s people had died under the guards’ swords in doing so. And it wouldn’t have made sense, mere hours before, that they’d risk themselves for the king they hated, except now it did. It horribly did. And he was miserable about it.

They’d stayed to search for Raven, once the dead and injured were accounted for. They’d lost three guards, which could have been far worse, though Numair hoped no one said that to the guards’ families. Even the horses were only superficially harmed. Out of the nobles, the worst injured was Daine, who was viciously concussed from taking a blow to the head as a wolf from a horse’s hoof. Even her wild magic hadn’t stopped that, though she confessed to Numair that it had probably knocked her back into her right mind.

Don was livid at Daine, though he seemed to think it had been a mistake. Numair knew better. Constant was silent and shocked, cut in several places, though none dangerously. He was mostly upset about the horses, and glad his dogs were fine, though Bon Bon had also been galloped over. Remarkably, she was barely injured, and Daine promised to set her aches to rights as soon as her concussion had settled.

There was no sign of Raven. Most of the people of the Bog had been smart enough to get out of the way at the first crossbow bolt. Fatalities had been at a minimum. Daine and Numair saw the shellshocked royals home, Nora using her husband’s shoulder for balance on a sprained ankle, left Constant there to be fussed over by Pech, and then hobbled home themselves. Neither of them spoke. Daine kept going to, but then stopping as her eyes welled up.

Numair took her to the Darragon home, across the street, and gave her to Elspeth to put to bed. Daine gave him a stare which implied she saw this as a betrayal, but he knew she’d had her head rocked badly today. He could see it in her uneven pupils. He didn’t want her following him into the estate.

Injured animals, hares, wolves, and ravens alike, flew for home when they were injured. They went to ground.

Numair crept into the silent estate. The bedrooms were empty. The study was too. He paced from room to room, finding nothing.

Then, he figured it out.

Injured people, just the same as animals, went where they felt safe. And here, in this house which had never been his home, there was only one place he’d feel safe.

He found Savigny slumped against the wall in Constant’s old room, a trail of blood leading Numair there. For a brief moment, as Numair stepped through the door and over the tipped-up basket of scattered rocks, he thought Savigny was dead. There was a gory moonlight slashing through the stained-glass windows, a rectangle of that light gleaming into the bedroom. It lit up the corner of the old portrait, tipped against the wall, and the altar to Weiryn that Savigny had collapsed in front of, one hand curled around it. There was blood on Weiryn, too.

Then Sav moved, lifting his head to watch Numair in the doorway. And Numair saw that he had taken off the cowl he used to cover his hair and had bundled it against his face.

Dizzy with shock, Numair threw a handful of flame into the hearth – knowing he’d likely just lit every hearth in the building with the spill-over magic – and stumbled to kneel beside Savigny, who gave him a ragged smile. Trembling hands reached for the material wadded against his face. Numair lifted it away. He stared at the wound below, which was open, ghastly, horrendous. It lashed from Savigny’s throat to below his eye, opening his face like an over-ripe fruit. It was unbearable, and bleeding badly. Numair lowered the cloth once more to put pressure on the wound, noting how sluggishly the man was breathing. He didn’t know what to say.

“Oh, Numair,” Savigny sighed, using Raven’s voice to do so as his green eyes fluttered shut, letting his head loll into Numair’s gentle hands. “Come on, darling. You must have figured it out. Daine did.”

“No,” said Numair honestly. “I really didn’t.”


	37. How the Bodies Burn

“They never talk about the smell,” said Savigny as Numair entered the room, the first time he’d been allowed to enter since Ritsuko had arrived with her expression grim. Shortly after her arrival, she’d stepped out and told Numair to go for Pech, citing Savigny’s resistance to her healing. Numair had done so and Pech had come, but still Numair had been disallowed entry. Until now.

“What smell?” Numair asked, though, truth be told, his attention was taken up by watching Ritsuko working on the lacerated cheek with a fine pair of tweezers and a very thin coil of thread on a long bone needle. She was stitching it, Pech supporting Savigny’s head with one hand, the other holding a sodden cloth below Sav’s dripping chin.

“You’re wondering why I did it,” Savigny said, hissing as Ritsuko hooked the curved needle through the open flap of skin and cautiously used the tweezers to set it in place. They’d closed his throat, Numair noticed, his stomach queasy. But they were taking their time on the face. Pech looked positively green.

“If you keep talking, I’m going to misalign a nerve,” snapped Ritsuko. “But by all means, if you wish to look as though you’ve the sagged face of a palsy victim, keep going.”

Savigny went quiet, gaze fixed on the wall.

Numair lingered, and he waited, and he wondered.

“Lord,” said Numair, following Pech as the man stepped outside to smoke in the clean air of the outside. It was just the three of them; Numair had dismissed the few staff who were still there, and Daine hadn’t returned from Elspeth’s yet. Pech looked at him. “What you’ve seen tonight, you mustn’t speak of it with anyone.”

Pech drew on his pipe, examining Numair with his watery gaze.

“Ritsuko called me to help numb pain and clot the blood,” was his calm response. “It’s not often she’s asked that of me, you know. We get our fair share of injuries, with the hounds lashing out or people thrown from the horses, and it only takes one slip with an axe for … well, when the axe slips, no one asks why the blue on her cheek stays blue. They’re just glad for it. But if the person she’s working on has been healed too many times before, then she calls me with my concoctions to come and do what I can to soothe while she works. Funny, but I never figured cousin Savigny to be one of those needing something to carry him through a healing, as cosseted as his well-born life has been.” He drew, again, on the pipe, and blew the smoke out through clenched teeth. Watching the smoke billow against the wall and dissipate. “She said she struggled with healing him last time, but nothing like this. I should be interested in knowing why it is that his face resists healing so surely but not his leg.”

Numair was silent. What could he say? If Pech said to the king that he’d seen Savigny with his face slashed open, Don would know. Numair didn’t know why he was still defending Savigny, who’d he felt had betrayed him in some indescribable way, but he knew he had to at least try, at least until Sav told him why.

“I’m not going to ask what happened,” said Pech, quieter now. “Perhaps I should just be glad of it. Treason doesn’t run in the marquis’s blood. Whatever he’s done, I’m certain it’s with reason.”

“You’ll hear stories,” Numair stammered.

“Pah. Stories. I don’t like them.” Pech smiled, though it wasn’t a good smile. He still looked unwell, which Numair didn’t blame him for. Donatien had had all the momentum being atop a horse had given him as he’d let the blade fall. “They’re just so wiggly, dear Numair.”

Numair staggered back into the room, which smelled of blood and vomit. Savigny was a colour Numair had never before seen on a living man.

“Why is he conscious?” Numair whispered, inching his way over to where Ritsuko worked. It was slow, horrifying work. She’d tried to explain why, but Numair didn’t listen. He knew, anyway. He recalled warning Constant of the dangers of stitching together without care for the small muscles, the intricate structures. And a human face, what could be more intricate than the seemingly simple expanse of bone and skin and muscle that, without which, they couldn’t smile, laugh, frown, cry? Savigny, as Ritsuko pieced him back together, was garishly awake, and suffering, even with Pech’s help.

“He’ll asphyxiate if he’s not conscious to help clear his own airways,” said Ritsuko, Savigny’s glazed eyes tracking Numair as Numair paced, as wide and worried as though he expected Numair to attack him right there for his deceit. Blood marked the corner of his mouth. “He bleeds both ways.”

Numair didn’t know what she meant with that, until he did. Then he felt sick, going and sitting himself on the bed with his head between his knees.

“There, there,” murmured Savigny, his voice strange as he tried to do so without moving his lips. “You’ll survive, Numair.”

He must have tried to smile. Numair heard him moan with pain.

But he didn’t look up, because he couldn’t bear it.

Once it was stitched closed as best as Ritsuko believed she could, she used her Gift to try and tempt the edges of the ravaged skin to seal. As she told Numair, who watched while Pech dozed on the bed, she had to at least seal the inner wound which had lacerated through the cheek and into the mouth. Otherwise it would gather saliva and food and rot from the inside out, if it didn’t choke him in the night with bloodied gore in his throat. It seemed she’d had some luck, at least, she didn’t look displeased when she stood to wash her hands.

“I don’t know how it’s going to heal externally,” she warned Savigny, examining her stitches before she covered them. “It will certainly scar. As for the nerves …” She frowned at him. Savigny avoided eye contact with her. “I don’t know. It’s missed your mouth so your smile might be fine unless the skin tightens, but I don’t like how close it is to the eye. We’ll know more when the swelling goes down, I suppose.”

There wasn’t much else to be said after that. Pech removed himself to a guest room to sleep until morning. Ritsuko did the same, Numair showing her to her quarters. She needed to be here in case Sav took a turn for the worst. When all was quiet, dawn light spilling through the windows, Numair crept his way back to the room where Savigny was curled on the bed on his uninjured side, nothing visible to Numair but the bright white of the bandaging that now covered the whole left of his face. He was asleep.

Numair settled onto the low couch, intending to think about the events of the day. To come to terms with them in his head before he demanded answers from Savigny.

Instead, he slept, and dreamed of terrible things that didn’t bear repeating.

Numair woke to a touch on his shoulder, hearing himself grunt as he swallowed his last deep inhale. He felt groggy and surprised, sitting upright and finding Daine leaning over him, on knee on the cushion Numair was prone on. She touched her finger to her mouth and straightened, shoving lank hair from her eyes. She looked exhausted and peaky, one eye and most of her forehead a swollen expanse of purple and greenish yellow. A spectacular bruise, Numair thought, eyeing it. But also astounding she hadn’t gotten her head kicked open.

She looked over to Savigny, who was still asleep. Bright afternoon sun slashed through the crack between the curtains, burning Numair’s eyes and – judging from the way Daine winced – aggravating a monstrous headache. But, still, he crawled his way upright, feeling disgusting in his sweaty, bloodied clothes, and limped his way over to the bed. Every one of his muscles hurt from his mad rush across the roofs, so he couldn’t imagine how everyone else was faring.

This feeling grew as he looked down on Savigny, biting back a gasp at how swollen and sore the man’s face looked around the edges of the bandaging. He was still the disconcerting colour of a human who’d lost too much blood, his mouth an unhappy, lopsided shape from the strain of gritting his teeth against the pain. He’d bled more from his mouth during the night, which Daine dodged around Numair with a wet cloth to wipe up before she slid onto the bed and began to lift the bandaging, determined to see for herself the damage that had been done.

Numair looked away. He didn’t want to know, not yet.

There was a whimper and a rustle of stiff bedding as Savigny shuddered awake, Daine soothing him with whispers Numair couldn’t hear. It took some effort, but Numair managed to look back at him, finding Sav sitting quietly with his expression dazed and tight while Daine felt the skin around the stitches.

Numair blinked. It …

It didn’t look so bad after all. The careful work Ritsuko had done had turned what had looked like a mound of mashed meat into a well-contained line of dark stitches against the red-pink skin of the sword slash. It didn’t look nice, but it looked no worse than any other penetrating injury he’d seen and, honestly, it looked better than many of them too.

“That looks like it’s going to heal clean,” said Daine approvingly. “There’s give in the skin around it too, at least once the swelling lessens more. I’d be shocked if it distorts your mouth.”

Savigny gave her a look that broke Numair’s heart.

“Truly?” he rasped.

The raw hope there hurt. Even in the middle of everything, with everything they had to lose, Numair knew Sav was devastated by this. He wondered how he’d feel if it was his face scarred so severely, but he already knew he’d feel dismayed by it. His face was a part of him, not just an aspect of his vanity. To have to altered so substantially would be a momentous blow to his sense of self.

“I wouldn’t lie to you,” Daine said, setting the bandage back into place with firm care. “You won’t be no pretty summer flower anymore, but you’ll still dazzle everyone you wish to. Perhaps more like a rose than a daisy.”

That had been a mistake. Savigny’s hopeful expression froze.

It took them a moment to realise why; Don’s standard was a rose.

“He didn’t mean to –” Numair began, but Daine was two steps ahead of him.

“We’ll think up a story,” she was saying. “Some injury that happened during your return. Everything was so wild yesterday, Don won’t know this wound matches the one he gave Raven.”

“Yes, he will,” monotoned Savigny, sitting upright. He was now looking at Numair, trying to meet Numair’s eyes. Numair looked away. “He’s not a fool. And there were so many witnesses, it doesn’t matter – someone there will put two and two together. You and Numair did.”

“I knew already,” was Daine’s tart response. “Why would a gissy I’ve never met bother to be so careful not to let me get a snuff of her, so careful she carries around perfumes too strong to wear? And Raven’s too tall to be anyone else I know, even in your fancy boots.”

Numair glanced to said boots, which had been tossed into the corner when they’d helped Savigny change out of his bloodied clothes. The heels were modified to alter his height. He remembered noting that Raven was taller than him and glared at the boots as though they’d personally offended him.

And then Daine asked what Numair hadn’t found the air to ask yet.

“Sav,” she said, voice lowering and almost – but not quite – obscuring how hurt she sounded, “why?”

Sav wasn’t trying to meet Numair’s eyes anymore; his focus was wholly on Daine. Numair thought this was because he’d realised Numair wasn’t ready to meet him midway yet. Quickly he realised this was wrong. Sav was looking at Daine instead of Numair not because he’d given up on Numair; it was because, out of the two of them, Savigny needed Daine to understand more than he needed Numair to.

“Do you remember when my parents died?” Sav asked her, his stare intent.

Daine gave a half shrug and then a shudder. “Better than you,” she replied, voice tight. Sav went to frown, but she added, “If that’s what you’re going to use as an excuse for treason, you don’t see me or Constant out dressing as bird-faced wenches burning temples. And we were there for more of it than you were.”

“I’m no traitor,” Sav retorted, bristling. “Everything I did, I did for my king. I started at the wrong place. It wasn’t their deaths. It was their pyres. They lay herbs in the wood, you know.” This was for Numair’s sake; Daine knew her people’s funeral rites. “For the smell. It doesn’t help. I was … twenty. Six years ago, when they burned their bodies. I suppose I wasn’t as sad as I could have been, truly. At the time I thought I was callous, but looking back I suspect I was just in shock for a long time following. There was so much suddenly on my shoulders – raising Constant, training as the Gift with Cole while also taking up duties for the queen, who’d lost her Gift when my mother died. There was the fief and organising a regent to rule for me, since I couldn’t leave the capital, not then. And, atop all of that, there was trying to discover what happened to my parents. Why they’d died, who had killed them, _how_ they’d killed them. My short-lived decision to attempt to become my father’s successor, as spymaster.”

Numair’s head snapped up at that. “Short-lived?” he asked. “Aren’t you still your father’s successor? Or was that another lie?”

“Not so much a lie … in a way, I am. I just realised I was going to have to be unconventional about it, especially when the queen died. And I was going to have to do it my way.” Sav looked at his blankets, plucking at them with an idle hand. “I couldn’t be my father, and I couldn’t stop dreaming of the smell of their bodies burning. And then the queen died. Eloise’s family. So many others. So many pyres. I grew desperate and Don, I didn’t know what was happening to Don. When my parents died, I pushed him away. It was too much, the way he was trying to lean on me throughout it, how much he _needed_ me. I was suffocating, and I couldn’t push anything else away – except him. So I did, I shut him out. I was so furious at him for needing me when I was already struggling, and I didn’t realise until years later that, looking back, he was only, what? Sixteen? Seventeen? We’d grown up so sheltered, he seems younger thinking back. We both did. Then his mother died, and he didn’t come to me. By then, he was used to me being emotionally unavailable and maybe the last thing I ever taught him was that you should grieve alone. And, by then, I was spending more time in the Bog, realising that here there were avenues of investigation I could use. He didn’t come to me so I figured he was fine. His mother had always been so distant, I couldn’t imagine he was that upset. After all, I barely cried at all when my parents died.”

He smiled tightly and regretted it, lifting his head to touch at the bandage as the smile fell away. Daine was very, very quiet.

“I didn’t know what they were doing to him,” Savigny said.

No one said a thing.

“When did Raven come into it?” was Daine’s way of breaking the miserable silence. Numair felt invisible. “You haven’t said that yet. You just keep talking about Don.”

“Because he’s integral,” was the response. “To the people I was speaking to in the Bog, I was Dark Rose. Those who knew I was the dread Marquis of Hartholm, son of the hated spymaster, for whatever reason they didn’t tell anyone. I’d always _been_ Dark Rose to most of them, and that wasn’t a name I took up from need or whimsy. It was just something I’d fallen comfortably into, not a persona I crafted or a person I built. Just a girl who liked to dance. A different outfit, almost. It was so easy. But Dark Rose, Don knows her. Daine, you knew her, somewhat. There were ties between me and her. If I was going to dig deep, I couldn’t be Dark Rose anymore than I could be a noble grubbing it in the alleys of the Lowest City. Especially when the tides turned against Don and I realised how much resentment was building towards him, in the wake of the murders and the mage crackdowns – I knew I’d have to be someone new, someone the people of the Bog trusted, if I was ever going to be someone who could stop them turning against my prince. So that was how Raven was born. She was just a gis in a mask who was intelligent and well-spoken, who popped into being when the city stunk with the smell of funeral pyres and managed to divert a bloody revolution. I don’t think anyone in the Jewel or the palace knows how close they came to disaster during that time. And I had to wear a mask, back then. I hadn’t figured out any other way of being. Besides, masks weren’t very unusual, in the Bog. Not then. The feeling was that they’d be murders soon, bloodied hands. No one wanted their faces seen.”

Savigny stopped talking, accepting water in the lull. He drunk slowly, with his head tilted as though he was worried it was leak from the laceration if he wasn’t careful. Numair wasn’t so certain it wouldn’t either, and he didn’t think he could stand the sight – so he didn’t look. He slunk into his seat and stared at his knees, not sure what he was feeling or how it was going to turn as the conversation continued.

“I remember that,” said Daine quietly. “The masks, I mean. I spent … time, in the Bog then.”

“Hiding from me,” Sav murmured.

His answer from Daine was a shrug as she took the water away and checked his bandage, which Numair saw was dry as he snuck a glance up through his lashes. “Hiding from everyone. I don’t remember much of it, just being hungry and scared. And that there was fire. I almost burned, a few times, going to sleep somewhere abandoned and waking up to it on fire.”

“That was the palace guards,” said Savigny shortly. “Don took ill for some time after his mother’s death. Pech’s mother – she was alive then – she said it was mind madness brought on by strain, but now I wonder if they were attacking him so early. I don’t remember what I thought of it, perhaps that it was a lie to allow him to hide away, because by then the guards had decided the Bog was too dangerous to stand and set it alight. I told you. Raven was born from fire, and the stink of human bodies burning. There was no space down there for Dark Rose the dancer, who was a timid, pretty thing, or Savigny –”

Daine, voice cracked, said, “Who is much the same, you know, for all you pretend not to be.”

“Exactly. I’m no … soldier. No fighter, no rebel, no spy. I like creating things and I like to dance and I like music. I like how these things can be found no matter where you go, from the palace to the poorhouse, even in those places you’d think people are too beaten down to imagine. But Raven, she couldn’t just be well-spoken and clever when the fires started and not even when they were put out, because there were always people wanting to fight back, to reclaim their homes. To start their own fires. And I knew if someone didn’t control them – didn’t start the fires where _they_ wanted – Don’s reign would be short and terrible. So, I shaped Raven out of that stink. I used it to make her sharp and mean, the kind of person no one would falter at following if they wanted to do harm. Pretty like the herbs, so welcoming to all who were crying for sanctuary, for a reprieve from the smell of burning, but underneath, well, no matter how much you tried, you couldn’t forget that she burned too.” Sav looked sick himself, which about matched how Numair felt. “She took a life of her own, eventually. Not like an outfit, but a whole new skin. And then I met Nonny, who was fleeing Tortall. Three years before I would have loathed Nonny, who was … terrible. A knife if ever I’ve seen one. But I was too deep by then, pulling so many strings and always, always, always so close to losing control. Can you imagine how it is, to dance on the edge as a paper-thin being made of the memory of smoke for _years_ , Daine? I’d been doing it for years by then, always knowing that I would be beheaded as a traitor by the king I was protecting if he found me out, and always knowing that I would be stoned by the people I fought beside if they realised my loyalties were divided. I wanted to save my king, and I wanted to help my people, and I knew both sides would tear me apart if they realised. Then, in saunters Nonny, and they … they know how to cut Savigny away and just be Raven, when needed. They knew how to craft a whole new face.”

Numair, now, was fixated with horror. He watched as Savigny struggled upright and touched his fingers to his chest, tracing an imaginary line. He watched as Savigny took a deep breath, closed his visible eye, readied himself, and then called upon his Gift – which flared, bright and brilliant, for a heartbeat of second before it settled. But it didn’t fade completely. It glowed in swoops and lines and tessellations all over the upper half of Savigny’s body, where somehow he’d tattooed his skin with his own _Gift_. Numair stared, dazzled and confused, though his brain was pinging as though he’d seen this before. When the glare of the Gift faded, so too did the lines, leaving Savigny’s skin unmarked except in the afterimage of the shapes on their retinas.

“How …?” gasped Daine.

Numair didn’t give Savigny time to answer.

“Healing,” he said shortly. “It’s done with a temporary ink applied over and over again into the skin, and healed into place every time. Only in the lines where the tattoo is applied, like a guideline. Eventually, what’s left is a pattern of Gift-work in the skin, an area of highly concentrated, layered Gift. Invisible unless the user has the ability to call upon them, though it must only contain their Gift to do so. You’ll find the same thing in people who have been healed many times, especially if those healings are in the same place. Alanna’s leg is much like this, except many Gifts layered into the scar-tissue and in no shape like this. It’s part of why those who have been healed too many times develop resistance. Too much build-up of conflicting magic asking the body to do too many things at once.”

“It’s the shape that matters,” Sav said, touching once again the bandage, which intersected several of those strange lines. “Like a pregnancy charm, the shape contains the intent of the magic. Unlike a pregnancy charm, its strength comes from the bearer of the workings, who is also the Gift-user. In this case, me. They hurt, though, or they did when they were laid. Since I had to call on my Gift every time to use them and cement the illusion into them …” He trailed off, once again avoiding Numair’s eyes. Numair’s throat was dry, thinking of the curse leeched into Savigny’s Gift that the Badger had helped him remove. “Cole taught me how to hide the colour of my Gift, which is how I didn’t give myself away to everyone with mage-sight who’d recognise the distinctive shade of my Gift. I taught Nonny to do the same since it suited me to have someone able to illusion themselves as me if I needed to be somewhere as Raven and have an alibi as Savigny. The end result is an illusion that can’t be stripped away by mages such as what Numair did last night, and it’s built into my body – once activated, it will stay in place until I ask it not to. I’ve seen evidence that it lingers even beyond death, if the power of the mage is great enough to have enough residual strength remaining in the corpse. We’re not snuffed out like candles when we die, you know. We linger. Not for long, but long enough.”

“So you’ve an illusion built into yourself,” breathed Numair. “No wonder it’s so detailed.”

Savigny nodded. “I’ve had years to perfect it, and I’m very good at the fine details. As her notoriety grew, I realised I couldn’t carry a physical mask with me, or I risked being caught. I also have embroidery in some clothes, which I experimented with setting the illusions into, if I ever wished to set more decoys. That’s how Nonny taught me initially, mind. Their clothes are their illusions, in the workings stitched into the seams. The tattoos were my idea, built from a concept I found in a book from Saren. Numair must have read the same book, though they used the tattoos for –”

“Warfare,” said Numair grimly. “They used it to turn weak mages into weapons.”

“And I,” said Savigny, “used it to turn a weak man into a belief. Raven isn’t a _person_ , not anymore. She’s something the people of this city whisper about. They may pray to their gods for their souls, but Raven is the one who feeds them and who fights for them. She lights the fires and directs the flames. She’s the benefactor of their bodies. I am, I assure you, _terrified_ of what she’s become and how all-consuming she is. Numair, I once said to you that you’d never understand the danger Raven poses to me and I know you took that to mean she was manipulating or threatening me.”

Numair stared at him and, for the first time since he’d sat here, Savigny met that gaze and they watched each other, warily, uneasily. Like strangers. Like they hadn’t for so long.

“Truly, I didn’t lie,” Sav said quietly. “I am in danger from her. Sometimes, when I use the magic laid into my body to vanish into the mask, to cease being a human being and to step into the shoes of a king’s nightmare, sometimes I wonder how many more times I’ll do so before I vanish completely. She is, as I said, consuming. Anathema to who I am, or who I thought I was, anyway. Violent, vicious, cruel. As her, I am all these things as well, and it’s so destructive to my sense of self, I know one day something has to give. It won’t be Raven. I made her too powerful for it to be Raven. If anything gives, if anything fades …”

He closed his visible eye again, gritted his teeth, his hand jerking automatically towards the bandage – as though to assure himself it was still there, or because it hurt, Numair didn’t know. He doubted he’d ever trust himself to know what Savigny felt ever again.

Savigny finished, damningly, “If anything is to be destroyed by this, I know it will be Raven, not Savigny, left standing. I know it in my bones, and in the way I’ve veered so much closer to Raven’s goals than those of the Savigny I was when I created her, as the years have gone by. And that was why I couldn’t tell you, any of you. I didn’t want you to know what I, or she, is capable of. I didn’t want you to know that I made her a part of my skin, of my body and my being. I wanted to know that, if I needed to, I could still come home.” His eye opened. His hand dropped. He sagged in place. And he said, “Now you know. So now I can’t. There’s no escaping her anymore.”

“Sav,” began Daine in the following silence, the sympathy in her voice sparking something cold and unusual deep in Numair’s belly. “I don’t think any of us are going to let you vanish, don’t talk so sil –”

The cold thing had crawled up, noxious and mean. Numair had no idea where it had come from but here it was, in his stomach, in his lungs, in his chest, wrapping foul lashings of rage around his barely beating heart. His brain was merely buzzing, his hands were balled tight to his thighs. He was rigid. It reached the base of his skull, leaking cold into his brain, the rage fizzling, overflowing, spluttering out of his mouth:

“ _You’re_ in danger?” said the cold thing using his mouth, looking at Savigny but thinking, and seeing, his duplicitous past, another lying lover, someone else who took honeyed words and sad thoughts and used them to craft a world they could reign over. “You? You’re the one _holding the knife_ , Savigny. You set the fires, _you_ burned the people. The temple that blew up? How many died? _Who_ set the fuse?”

Daine and Savigny were staring, open-mouthed at him, which was baffling until he realised he was shouting. Had he ever shouted at them before? He didn’t remember. What was happening to him?

“You did it!” he snarled, hot sparking now, melting the cold. Oh, the heat was worse, it made him stupid. He so rarely lost his mind with anger but he was thinking of Raven unfeelingly offering Kalasin up like a lamb to slaughter, and he was thinking of how Raven had used his past against him to insinuate that Numair and _Don_ were those who had to fear Ozorne’s legacy. He was thinking of being left like trash on the palace floor, sunk in the fearwood nightmare. All those who had suffered, all who had died, all because a man had hid behind a mask and claimed himself a throne. “I trusted you because I thought you had Galla’s best interests, your people’s best interests, in mind with everything you did. Now you sit here and you tell me you created a legend around yourself for what, your selfless desire to fix the world? You have spat _so_ much hate at Donatien for what he’s done, but you – you’ve done so much worse, Savigny, in your _right_ mind nonetheless. You weren’t mad or scared when you first crafted Raven, were you? Maybe you wanted to do good then, but then you made a life out of it, out of lying to the people around you.”

“I helped them –” Sav stammered.

“But you did it to help Don, who you admitted then you thought was unfit,” snapped Numair, who didn’t even understand his point anymore – until suddenly, horribly, he did. “You thought he was crushing his people, a despot, a tyrant … and you responded by slinking into the ranks of those you _believed_ so fully that he was harming, and you pretended to be their friend while all the time you would have turned on them in a heartbeat if you’d had to pick who lived. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’re wro –”

“ _While looking at me_ ,” snarled Numair, his voice so obscene. He’d never heard himself like this; he hated it. He wanted to stagger from the room and scream, somewhere where they’d never hear how much he was hurting. It was too much; seeing the blade fall, the helplessness inherent in his too-great powers, knowing Savigny was as false as any other. “Look at me and tell me I’m wrong, that you would have let Donatien die if it would have saved the people who trusted you. That you wouldn’t have cut their throats for him. They _trusted_ you, I trusted you – I trusted you to know right from wrong, Oz –”

He stopped, but the damage was done. Savigny reeled back. Daine’s teeth clicked as she shut her mouth so fast her was certain she caught her tongue.

And no one dared to speak.

No protestations came. No allusions to innocence. They just stared at each other in a tepid, hollow silence.

“Ozorne tried to kill you,” Savigny said, his words thick. Numair went to lash back, to tear at him with his incendiary tongue, but he didn’t have to. Savigny was far ahead of him. “And I left you on the palace floor. You’re right. She, I … I’m reprehensible. I’ve caused so much hurt.”

In the face of that frank confession, all of Numair’s anger vanished. It simply snapped away, leaving behind only the ache of his coiled muscles and his hurting heart to remind him that it had ever been there at all. He didn’t know what to say, except he had a sudden absurd urge to apologise before something was done he couldn’t undo.

“You’ve done great good too,” said Daine suddenly, her voice so shocking they both flinched back from it. She looked mulish, her eyes vengeful. “Seems to me that when a city turns in on itself, there’s no one who can do good without hurting too, not when it’s brother against brother. Numair, you’ve a heart bigger than mine and a brain that’s enviable, when you use it. I’ve never respected anyone like I do you when it comes to the big thoughts, like what makes good good. But I think you’re wrong, right now. I think you’ve messed up the big thoughts with the little, like what it’s like to be small and alone in the middle of the slums fighting to survive a killing winter. You don’t have big thoughts when that’s happening, you can’t. You’re too small for it. You’ve just got to keep fighting however you can, with what your little animal thoughts give you. The way I see it, me and Sav, we’ve been stuck in that killing winter since the Hartholms died. We don’t get the privilege of thinking your big pretty thoughts, and we don’t get to take a breath and look around and see everything in the world and place ourselves morally into it, above fault. Sav’s not Ozorne. I’m not a monster. And we’ve been fighting so long, so fiercely, to be alive by spring, we’re allowed our missteps. Everyone else here is making them too. If you want to condemn Savigny for the claws he’s given himself, then you’ve got to condemn me too.”

Numair had no words. He sat mute.

So, this way, it was Daine who ended the conversation as surely as a door slamming in his face. “Sav’s my brother,” she said, folding himself into the bed beside him, angled against Numair, though she looked saddened to be so. “He’s always going to be. And I can tell you as surely as I know a rabbit from a cat – he’d never turn on me, or Don, or his people. So you’re wrong. And I think you should go and think about that before you come back again, please.”

Wordless and dismissed, Numair left. Not the estate; he knew she wasn’t asking him to go for good, and he wasn’t so sore that he decided to take the dismissal as so. Angry and hurt or otherwise, he knew what she was asking him to do was to give them the space to figure out where they stood in this uncertain new world where Savigny, her brother, and the man Numair knew he loved, was also someone who frightened them both. She was asking him to use that brain to temper his accusations before he flung them stillborn into the world with devastating effect. She was asking him to make sure he meant what he was saying, when he accused Savigny of cruelty beyond what Numair had thought him capable. He was ashamed to realise that, in this, she was right. He should have done this before he’d lashed out. But he’d been so angry, and he’d wanted to hurt Savigny in the way that he felt he’d been hurt.

It would change them all, this discovery. Maybe, he considered, his fear was because he didn’t know how much.

He gathered his things from the bedroom and took them to the guest room, where he lay on the cold bed and considered, fully, how far he’d go for his country and his people. He didn’t think of their romance, or their future, and he definitely did not think of Savigny’s face as he’d seen Numair take his belongings from the room they’d shared.


	38. The Emperor Mage

Savigny hadn’t returned from Hartholm.

Donatien frowned at the short missive Daine had scrawled in response to Don’s request for Savigny to report to him upon his return. The man had been due back from his travels three days before, and Don was eager to see him. But Daine’s response, in her usual blunt manner, said that Savigny had been delayed and there was currently no expected date of return.

This was more upsetting to Don than Don cared to admit.

He scrunched the parchment up and flicked it into the hearth, ignoring the tight press of misery at the base of his throat. He hadn’t seen Savigny since his wedding, two months prior. Part of him worried that this separation was going to damage the cautious reconnection they’d found in the time since digging Savigny out from below the Bog, but Don knew that the largest part of him wanted Sav back so Sav could see what Don was making of his throne. Change had finally come to the palace.

After the disastrous ride to the Bog of the month before, when Nora had forced Don to face his terror and it had all gone so wrong, it was the opinion of many – Numair and Constant, included – that to continue those rides would be foolish. Nora had disagreed, as had Daine. Don hadn’t known which way to fall. His heart still hammered wildly with the memory of how close the demon mage, Raven, had come to harming the queen, but it had been one moment in an afternoon of more ruling than Don felt he’d ever done before. He’d realised as they’d ridden through the lower cities just how much he missed his people, being among them as one of them, understanding their fears and lives just as well as he understood his own.

Rainary had gone from raving about the ride to a cautious silence, reporting back to him that the feeling in the lower cities was that the act of attacking the king and his new wife as they’d grieved their dead queen was a grievous misstep. There were too many people with all their hopes for a peaceful shift in power locked onto Nora; Raven had made no friends with her attempt on Nora’s life.

Thus, when Nora came to him and asked if he’d ride again, Don said yes.

He refused to hide anymore.

Nora came to Donatien that night, as he fretted about Savigny’s delay.

“Do you think he’s come to trouble on the road?” Don asked her as she entered the room and watched him pace before the fire. “Perhaps Hartholm is suffering raids from Scanra again and he’s chosen to help defend it. Do we have enough men to send a force if needed?”

“I’m certain if Hartholm needed defence it would have summoned it,” was Nora’s uninterested response.

“But it’s almost winter,” Don replied, striding to the window and glaring outside at the sodden clouds blocking the moonlight. “If he doesn’t ride soon, he’ll be snowed in. Hartholm is all gullies and mountain …”

Nora didn’t answer. Don could feel her gaze burning the back of his neck.

“Why didn’t he come home with the grain?” murmured Don. He leaned against the window, the icy glass soothing to his flushed face. Behind him, he heard Nora move to his desk, and the clink of his decanter being lifted and placed back down. He turned, irritated, to find her staring at him with the distaste in her expression searing. “What? I’ve had wine with my supper.”

Her voice was bland as she turned towards the sleeping chambers they unhappily shared. Don hadn’t wanted to, but Nora had correctly pointed out that the servants would talk if they were making up two clean beds for their royals, who were supposed to be gleefully involved with each other. If he’d reacted by drinking himself to sleep in his study more nights than not, well. That was his concern and nobody else’s.

“Tonight, Biscuit,” she said.

Don went cold. His eyes slid to the desk; she’d taken the decanter with her. “But it’s so soon since the last,” he managed, icier than the window behind him. Barely holding back his unease. “You were bleeding just days ago, surely?”

Or had it been longer?

He didn’t know. He tried not to attend to it.

She didn’t answer. The door clicked shut behind her, an impassable barrier between Don and the end of his torment. He knew from experience that she’d give him an hour at most to steel himself before she came looking to lash him with the nastiest side of her tongue. If he didn’t want her berating him atop the torture following, he had to be ready before then. Fortunately, as he walked to his desk and felt for the latch of the lowest drawer, which was cleverly obscured to make it seem as though it wasn’t there, he’d become wise to her ways faster than she’d become wise to his.

He took a seat by the fire, flask in hand, and steeled himself with the wine within.

They sat at opposite sides of the bed; Nora closest to the fire as she warmed her bare legs. He hated her for her easy nudity, the fire bright on her dark, smooth skin. He hated the shape of her breasts and her firm muscles and the dark space between her legs that seemed to exist purely to taunt him. He knew he’d be ill if she made him look at her again, and he knew his hatred of her body was irrational yet growing exponentially every time he was forced to lie with her. She was beautiful. He was very lucky.

He gagged, buckling down the middle and resting his head upon his knees. He could smell her on his skin. The sordid scent of what they’d tried to do, his body clammy all over with the sweat of it. He felt as muddled as a poppy-smoker.

“The theatrics are unamusing,” Nora said coldly, watching him. “You’re acting like a child at an unpleasant healing.”

“Let me calm my head,” Don said into his knees, knowing if she touched him right now he’d be violently sick. His skin felt as though it was twitching off at the thought of her hands.

“And we can try again?”

She was, he thought, relentless. He hated her. He hated her more than he’d ever hated anyone ever before. He wanted to peel her off of his skin; he wanted to scrub himself until he was raw and bleeding and as disgusting on the outside as he felt within, so she’d never touch him again. Most of all, he hated how he knew she found him desirable, as though her arousal despite his disinterest was mocking his inability to excite himself appropriately.

“Come on, Donatien,” she sighed as he didn’t respond. “It’s not so difficult. You’re not some fainting virgin, unless there’s something you’re not telling me.” He unscrunched himself and looked at her through his soiled hair, which was lank over his eyes. Curling his knees up to stop her looking at his body and barely managing to hide the urge to grab for the blankets. Her gaze, hatefully, darted to his crotch and the useless organ that he possessed. “Perhaps you should speak to a physician. I hear they have a powder to help with that.”

“There’s nothing wrong with _that_ ,” Don snapped.

She smirked.

He hated her.

“Fine,” she sighed. “Come here. I’ll use my hand and you close your eyes and think of Savigny. I only have need of your issue, not the rest of you.”

She rolled across the bed and reached for him, but he saw her hand coming and launched out of reach. The room launched with him, his feet sliding out from under him as he staggered into a dresser, slamming his hip against the corner and almost dropping to his knees with the sharp, short pain of it. Blindly, eyes watering, he grabbed for his robe and hauled it on, hiding his deceitful, broken body from her vile gaze.

“Hark,” she said, her voice like nails, “see the blushing virgin king of Galla.”

“I’m not a virgin,” he snarled at her, matching her reprehensibility with some of his own and turning his loathing onto her, the closest target that he wanted to hurt, even though he knew she was immune to his fury. “And I hardly see how it’s my fault that you can’t excite me. Perhaps I should ask one of Savigny’s ladies to come and teach you what to do.”

This said, decorum lost, he strode out and left her lying there.

At mornmeal, she giggled at his jokes and teased him with a honeyed spoon. He smiled and fluttered back at her, feeling the eyes of the court upon them. Why their meals must be a public affair, he’d never know, but the monarchs had always started the day with a simple meal shared with the palace court. Since his marriage, he’d begun attending again, to show his court that normalcy had returned to the realm.

“Where did you sleep?” Nora asked softly, between threatening to take his honey from him if he added more to his already sweetened porridge.

To Don’s other side, Constant was silently working his way through his own meal. His spoon only briefly hesitated as he heard Nora’s whispered query. Don looked down into his lap, where a blocky white head announced Earnest oozing up from below the table, begging for scraps.

He answered while dropping bacon onto his lap for the dog, ignoring the marks it left on his breeches. They were covered with drool anyway, and he knew he had limited time before Constant noticed and scolded the hound for mooching.

“I assisted Lord Constant with some enquiries,” he said stiffly, his smile still in place as Earnest gazed lovingly up at him. It was impossible to frown at such a sweet face, and Earnest was trying to be so subtle in his bacon eating that his ears were wiggling with his focus. “I’m afraid it took most of the night. I hope you weren’t too lonely, my love.”

He felt her sigh.

“We’ve two more nights before my fertile time ends,” she warned him. “Constant, if he comes to haunt your couch tonight, send him home. Preferably not covered in dog fur.”

Don looked at Constant, who looked pinned. Caught between a command from his queen and the potential for his king to belay it. It wouldn’t be fair to do so, Don knew. Making Constant a part of this battle would be cruel, and he didn’t need to test the loyalty the boy had to him. All that would do was incite enmity between Constant and his queen.

“I’ll be there, darling,” he said, turning back to his queen and beaming at her like she was Bon Bon, Earnest, and his otters all bound up into one person. It was much easier during the day; he really only hated her during the night, three moons a cycle. Outside of that, she pleased him with how confident and fierce she was, rather much like Savigny but without Savigny’s soft, kind edges. Then, those three nights would come again, and he’d return to wishing he could throw himself, or her, from the keep rather than have her touch him again.

“Sober,” she warned.

“Of course,” he lied.

On this night, when he fled to the other side of the bed, she didn’t follow. She just sat at stared at him mutely, for the first time shocked into silence. It had been going so well; he’d drunk enough, but not too much, that he’d been calm as he’d told her to do as she needed while he lay flat. It had been going so well, his eyes closed and his mind on other things.

It had been going so well, until she’d taken him, and he’d opened his eyes, and realised. Then he’d panicked, her heat and weight too much, almost hurting himself with the violence with which he’d fled her.

“Don?” she murmured, her voice odd. He almost shrieked at her when he heard the tone of it, horror gripping his heart so tight it hurt. He wanted the loathing back; at least he understood _that_. “How did you couple with Savigny?”

“I didn’t _couple_ with him,” Don spat. “We made love. It was nothing like this.”

If he was expecting her to mock him for his weakness, he was surprised. She didn’t say anything for a moment.

Into that silence, he felt obligated to add, “He didn’t … there was no expectation of arousal. We were just together. That was all that mattered. And when we’d had enough, we stopped.” He wiped his damp face with a shaking hand, muttering, “I didn’t know we were doing it wrong.”

Nora, quietly, asked, “But you did … you can …?”

He nodded jerkily, though in all honesty he didn’t think he ever really had. Not how Savigny had. It had just never mattered.

Briefly and horribly, he wished that Savigny was home. He needed him more than Hartholm. If nothing else, he knew that if he asked Savigny for his understanding and advice about his bed, though Savigny would hate it, he’d do his best to help Don understand what was happening to him. And he’d never make Don feel broken, or cursed, or desolate. It had just been so _easy_ with them.

Nora fiddled with the bedding, the low crackling of the fire the only sound between them.

Eventually, she asked, “And did you cry when you were with him?”

Don stared at his lap, feeling the heat on his cheeks. The heat was back, the panic. The crushing pressure in his skull of knowing he was failing, just how his mother had feared he would. Her voice in his memory, shrill and sly, pointing out his inadequacies –

 _“Princes don’t cry, Donatien,”_ he heard her whisper, his whole body racketing into a stiff line of horror. His mind crying no no no _no_ as it railed against the potential for the hallucinations to return. It had been months without them; he’d thought they were _gone_. But, again, her voice, just behind his ear as though she was reclined in the cavernous space he and Nora had left between them: _“Look at you, barely a man at all. I knew I should have found you a female consort before that boy turned your head. We could have fixed this early.”_

Don refused to turn around, counting backwards in his head as he focused on his hammering heart. He could make it go away again. He’d done it once. He could do it again.

“I’m not crying,” he said solidly, finding the thin sliver of peace that Constant was always telling him would pull him out of a panic. He clung to it. “That would imply I feel anything about this. Don’t flatter yourself.”

Breathing deep again, he turned. The bed was empty, except for Nora. And the peace. He could remain calm. It was as simple as feeling nothing.

He wiped his face with a towel, drunk half a glass of water, and slid back onto the bed.

“We’ll try again,” he gritted out between clenched teeth, clinging desperately to his calm, and his sanity.

A bird arrived from Cole, requesting an audience with King Donatien for the Emperor of Carthak and his retinue. They were close to the border, less than a week away. Don, who had only Nora and Constant to guide him until Cole or Savigny returned, puzzled greatly over it. Numair had warned him it was coming, but it was still a glaringly odd way for one ruler to approach another.

Constant wasn’t offering much advice today. He’d been quiet ever since Don had shown him the message in Cole’s hand. Nora, too, was silent, though in her case it was because she had buried herself under what seemed like every book and scroll the palace library had on Carthak and its politics, trying to catch herself up on several hundred years of political history all in one afternoon. For all the tension between them, he admired her hugely when he saw her at times like this, determined to make herself the queen her country needed so badly.

“It’s odd timing, too,” Don commented, pacing the study. “They’ll arrive mere weeks before the snows do, which means they won’t be leaving until spring. If they haven’t even ensured their welcome, why gamble with that?”

“It’s hardly a gamble,” said Constant dully. Don eyed him; was the boy getting sick? He’d recovered from his bruises so well, Don had stopped worrying about him being more injured than he’d let on, but now … Don frowned and angled his pacing to bring him closer to where Constant was curled on a low couch with his arms wrapped around the sleeping Bon Bon, Earnest snoring on his legs. “If you turned Carthak’s emperor away into a killing snow, you’d ignite a political nightmare the likes of which Galla hasn’t seen in centuries. Whatever his reasons are, Emperor Ozorne is certain of a place in your court, at least for the duration of winter.”

“Constant’s right,” was Nora’s muffled response from within the book she was buried in. “He has no need of niceties. We can’t turn him away, no matter how aggressively he presents himself. Have you seen the list of cousins that had to die to make Ozorne emperor? What an astounding turn of luck for the man.”

Her wry voice indicated that she, like the other two, was under no illusion that ‘luck’ had had anything to do with it. Carthak, for all of Don’s words to Numair about Tortall’s aggressive foreign policy, was an alarming eye to have turned upon them. Their reputation preceded them.

“What’s the feeling among the nobility?” Don asked Constant, who was liable to hear much more than Don or Nora was on the subject.

Constant pondered that before answering. “Most seem fairly inclined to treat with them,” he said finally. “We’ve had no incursions from Carthak. They’ve never been anything but a rich source of external income for us, so most are viewing this as an exciting opportunity to entertain royalty for the winter while potentially forming prosperous trade agreements. I suppose they might be right. A peace treaty with Carthak would offer us more financially than Tortall ever could, and Carthak is far stabler than Maren. They also have a dire need for stone, wood, and good iron, which we have in plenty.”

“Where do they get it now?” asked Nora.

Don answered, knowing this one; when it came to the complexities of imports and exports, he knew his world. “Tortall,” he said, pleased by the startled look she gave him over the book. Briefly, he longed to see her gaze at him like that in other areas of his life, warmed by the idea of her appreciation. But it faded fast; those three moons a cycle loomed hot and horrible between them, an impassable barrier to their friendship. “They traded in the time of King Roald, though relations crumbled shortly after his son’s coronation. Now, they raid for it, I understand. However, Ozorne is expansive. He wants to show the strength of his reign by building civilisation into the arid areas of his country, to prove the audacity of his engineers. For that, they need more than they can get through raiding – which, I’m certain, is why he’s coming. What other reason could he have?”

“And does this benefit us?” Nora asked Don.

Again, the brief swell of pleasure in her recognition of his aptitude. He smiled at her, knowing it was genuine, and was gratified by her wary smile in return.

“Very much so,” he assured her. “If I can gild our fiefs with Carthak’s gold, they’ll dance to any tune we play for them. It will also solve our issues with the border, as Carthak will be indebted to the security of their best supply of hard resources. We can flirt with a military agreement to supplement our own, which will keep Tortall back from the border. It will also give us the coin to actually build our own army, beyond the thin ranks we have right now. You wanted us to renew knighthood and return it to a combat force rather than what it is now, to mimic Tortall’s ways with them – we could afford to do that with Carthak’s coin like we can’t quite right now, with our finances tied up in preventing food shortages. Our people are bound to their fields. We need coin to improve their lives enough to claim their sons and daughters for a military force.”

Nora pondered it before offering another question, one Don knew had been coming: “And what do we risk with this?”

Constant, who knew this better than Don did, didn’t answer. He left it to Don, who thought back to Numair and his warnings.

“The potential that this is a gambit by Carthak to claim Galla as a backdoor into Tortall,” he said. This earned him Nora’s full attention. “He may be seeking to simply take what he wants, knowing we have little military might. This would fit the personality of the man, from what I’ve heard. He’s duplicitous and cruel.”

“The courtiers say he’s quite charming,” Nora said idly.

Don thought of Numair. “I suspect my source may be closer to the truth of the man.”

Don waited until Nora was asleep before he slunk from the soiled bed, crept into the night soil chamber, and was violently sick. Once he was done, he didn’t have the energy to get back up, and laid there in the smell feeling weak all over, his limbs trembling too fiercely to support him. The three days was over. It was over. They’d managed to couple only once with moderate success. He just had to hope it was, somehow, enough. Now, he knew, it was time for the aftereffects of this time of the month; while Nora would spend the next few weeks attuned to her body and hoping, desperately, for a quickening, he’d spend it locked in a battle with his own mind, chasing away nightmares and beating down his own revulsion in his self.

And, still, Savigny wasn’t home. Don thought of this and found a burst of energy he hadn’t known he was still capable of. A plan inspired him into action.

He’d wash himself – obsessively, he was finding, as the more times he and Nora circled each other like this, the more frantic he was getting in his baths – and go to the mews. The time of night didn’t matter. He was the king. If he decided sleep was unnecessary for him the gods would make it so. He’d send another message to Savigny, wishing him safe travels and citing how much he desired his return.

And he wouldn’t, he was certain, he absolutely wouldn’t beg for Savigny to come home.

Don’s pleasure in Cole’s return was tempered only by his awkwardness around Ozorne, who was just as charming as promised and twice as handsome to boot. Don did his best with the social graces his mother had had verbally lashed into him, but standing next to the tall, graceful man who was the great Emperor of Carthak, he couldn’t help but feel like a pallid imitation of a true king. Ozorne was everything he wasn’t: charming, confident, intelligent, sane.

“You spent nine months with the man,” Don asked Cole, who was attending him tonight as they prepared for a meeting with the man, to be taken over a feast that Don felt guilty about but couldn’t see a way around. They must present their strongest front, at least until Ozorne explained why he was there. “What’s your understanding of him?”

Cole hummed, leaning on his walking cane in his familiar way. Don almost sagged with the relief of having him back. He’d been alone for so long, and Cole was a fixture of the palace that stretched from now to before Don had been born, something as comfortable and true as Don’s name. “It’s truly hard to say, Majesty,” he said. He offered a wry smile and limped forward, clucking his tongue as he fixed Don’s lapels for him and fussed at his hair. “Astounding, you are. I leave for nine months and you go and get married and still can’t dress yourself. What am I going to do with you, you mess of a boy?”

Don laughed softly. He didn’t even mind Cole calling him a boy. It was nice to know that, at least to one person, he was still the person he used to be, no matter his mistakes.

“Are you mad at me for going behind your back?” he asked. Lingering over them was Cole’s shock when he’d been introduced to Nora as Don’s wife, and the new queen of Galla. For obvious reasons, Don hadn’t advertised their wedding widely enough for the news to have reached Carthak.

Cole leaned against a chair, frowning. He was greyer than he had been, Don noticed with a spark of alarm. Thinner, too. He’d always been a broad, gregarious man, surrounded by the spaniels he loved and always with a kind word and a sweet for a small, lonely prince. Now, he seemed to have shrunk into himself while he’d been gone, leaning heavier on his cane and with his usually neatly groomed beard greyed and scraggly. He’d never seemed to age, his dark skin unmarked by the years as they ticked on and affected everyone around him. Now, after nine months in Carthak, it seemed as though the last ten years had caught up with him all at once.

He was getting old, Don thought, and hated the thought. He needed Cole. He was the closest that Don, or Savigny, had ever truly had to a father, and he loved him more than almost anyone else.

“I can’t say I’m pleased,” said Cole finally, shaking his head. “But you’ve a good head on your shoulders, Majesty. If you felt she’s the best choice for Galla, I stand firmly with you.” His dark eyes sought Don’s and held him there. He said, softer now, “You’re looking better than when I left you. I thought I’d come back to the ghost of my boy, but here you are twice the weight and with life in your eyes. If your remarkable romance with this woman has saved you from the demons that ate at you for so long, I’ll forever be her man.”

Don sagged with relief. Cole’s dogs, also older than they had been, snuffled around his feet and he stooped to pick up his favourite, ignoring Cole’s sigh as he covered his fine clothes in fur. Cuddling the old lady hound, Don beamed at his old advisor.

“We’ve so much to speak of,” he said, bubbling with everything that had happened.

“And we will,” Cole promised him. “Once we’ve discussed the momentum of our countries with Ozorne. For all that he’s a difficult man, and as mercurial as a cat, I truly think he’s going to be a valuable ally to you, Don. Especially without Savigny around anymore.”

Don opened his mouth to tell the man that he and Savigny had mended burned bridges, or begun to, but he looked past Cole and saw Constant lingering in the doorway. It wasn’t like the boy to slink in unannounced, and it definitely wasn’t like him to stand back when there were hounds to be petted.

Don’s words died in his throat, killed by his shock at the expression on Constant’s face. It was one he’d never seen before on him, and it was laid solely upon Cole, who had his back to the boy. It was so impossible, so astoundingly out of place, that Don couldn’t speak in the face of it.

Constant, who’d never frowned at a flea, was staring at Cole as though he’d never seen a person he hated more, sheer, arrogant loathing written across his young features. He saw Don watching him. The look vanished, replaced with a courtier’s blank expression.

The ice was back. Don felt something shifting under his feet, some current he didn’t understand. A tug at his mind, a single thought: what does he know that I don’t?

Cole saw him looking and turned, spotting Constant. Briefly, he appeared politely interested, but in a vague way. Not at all the deference appropriate for a young lord.

He doesn’t know who Constant is, thought Don. Despite raising Savigny, he doesn’t know Constant.

And then, sly, a last thought, why?

Don had learned suspicion in a hard, dangerous school. Though he managed his paranoia with an iron fist, he wasn’t fool enough to fall back into his old ways of believing those who loved him as being above reproach. Betrayal was everywhere. And Savigny de Hartholm, who’d been shaped into a man in Cole’s image but hadn’t been seen at his side in seven years, was a man so proud of his brother he told all he knew of the boy’s exploits. Except, apparently, Cole.

“Constant, hello,” said Don, smiling at Constant but with one eye on Cole, who now looked at Constant with a renewed interest. “Have you met Magisra Cole? He’s Savigny’s, and my, mentor. You must introduce your hounds to him, he has a great love for dogs.”

Constant didn’t say a word, just looked Cole up and down. And then, finally, in a voice like spite, he said, “Does the man not know to bow to a peer?”

Nothing Constant had said in his entire life had ever left Don so cold. He’d been wrong to think that Constant merely hated Cole. There was more revulsion in that one line that Don had heard in a long time. It was a line aimed to place Cole firmly below Constant in the pecking order, to remind Cole of his diminutive place in the palace hierarchy. A place that Cole, by recognition of his long service, had never occupied.

With one disinterested line, Constant had reduced Cole to a servant, an old man playing nobility. It was a grievous blow, and the first time Don had ever seen Constant wield the edged blade of his nobility. Cole, who’d sunk into a belated bow, burned with the embarrassment of it.

“The queen summons you, Majesty,” Constant said without emotion, mocking his own bow before leaving without a single glance at the dogs.

“Constant de Hartholm?” said Cole into the awkward silence that followed. “He has Savigny’s dire manners. I knew it was a mistake letting Savigny raise that boy.” He smiled, the expression thin. Don, watching it cautiously, found that he didn’t like that smile very much. “You should have placed the boy under my care after the death of the parents. I would have done a far better job.”

“Constant is superb as he is,” Don snapped, wincing. He’d forgotten himself, seeing Cole turn hurt eyes onto him, his grip wavering on his cane. It was such a pained look at Don hurt too, rueful at himself for lashing out. “That was sharper than I intended. I apologise. I’ll arrange for Constant to come meet your lovely dogs, and for you to meet his. He’s wonderful, I promise. You’ll see.”

“I believe you.” Cole seemed back to normal, familiar and calming once again. He gestured to the door before taking his old dog from Don’s arms and sighing, once more, at his furry clothes. “Well, Majesty, your queen awaits. And Don?”

Don, who’d gone to leave, paused.

Cole touched his hand, offering a weary smile. “I am,” he said, “so glad to be back by your side. I’ve missed my home.”

“We’ve missed you too,” said Don, honestly.

“I do hope you’ll consider my offer,” said Ozorne to him over their meal.

The entire night, Ozorne’s sole attention had been on Don, only briefly deferring to Nora if she spoke up. But, without fail, as soon as she turned her attention back to her food, Ozorne would swing back to telling Don about the birds Ozorne kept or asking about Don’s mews or his menagerie. He was open with his compliments and seemed genuinely interested in Don in a way that, to Don, felt oddly familiar despite very few people showing interest in him.

And then he’d announced why he’d come: a week behind them, slowed by their great loads, his people were bringing grain, meat stores, rare delicacies. Enough food to fill their stores and some. Enough food to lift all of Cría out of rations with enough left over to spill into the surrounding fiefs. It was, he said, a gift. No expectation of repayment or tithe.

Carthak, he’d added, cannot prosper while Galla starves.

Don couldn’t turn him down. There were too many witnesses to this boon, too many people who chafed against the idea of rations reaching up even into the palace. Ozorne, by all accounts, had heard of Galla’s struggles and immediately organised the fastest ship to bring he and Cole here to offer his assistance, so certain of his welcome that he’d had his people follow shortly behind with as many goods as they could carry.

“And more will follow,” he promised over his wine glass, smiling so kindly at Don that, for a brief second, Don forgot to be suspicious of him. The expression was simply so _disarming_. “Of course, I wish to use this time away from my people wisely. Galla has just as much to offer Carthak as we do Galla, not least the iron I hear so much of. But that is unrelated to my desire to see your people healthy and strong.”

Don, now sipped at his own wine. He was thoughtful.

Nora nudged him, Don turning his attention to her as, on their other side, Ozorne spoke softly with one of his own nobles.

“You know who he reminds me of,” murmured Nora, her eyes on Ozorne. She hadn’t liked how he’d dismissed her, but she hadn’t pushed back either. She seemed content to dine quietly and watch. Don waited for her to answer her own thought, which she did. “Your mage friend, Savigny’s bit. That tall man.”

Numair.

Don laughed as though she’d told a wonderful joke, summoning a server to refill her glass. Then he turned back to his own food, one eye on Ozorne. Now she’d said it – and as Ozorne glanced to him and grinned, brightly, happily – Don saw it. Those expressions Ozorne used, the bright smiles and easy charm, they were very much exactly as the Tortallan mage carried himself. In fact, Don was certain that if he put them in a room together and watched how their body language, that they’d be as similar as if they’d be brothers.

Numair had said he had knowledge of Ozorne, perhaps intimate knowledge. Don had assumed it was through the political intricacies of the Tortallan-Carthak relations. Now, he wasn’t so sure.

“Tortall chafes at their borders,” he commented idly, feeling Ozorne’s attention snap back to him. “I’ve had a standing force of their king’s men manning a garrison on their side, along with marching forces long the length.”

Ozorne sipped his wine. “Their king has little respect for the belongings of others,” he said, mouth puckering into a small moue of distaste that he turned into a smile when he saw Don looking at him. His plate was empty. Don finished his own, Ozorne’s eyes darting to the last forkful as Don took it to his mouth. “Your animals – would you take me to see them come the end of our dinner?” He looked rueful, adding, “I’ve spent over a month on the road. I wish to sit quietly, away from all of this.”

“Certainly,” said Don, deliberately not looking at Nora.

They walked alone through the mews. Don had, for the first time, felt uncertain about showing off his menagerie, which he knew was nothing like the spectacular animals Carthak boasted in theirs. Don didn’t like the keeping of wild beasts, not since Daine had come into his life. But he still felt shy about showing off his chickens as though they were as wonderful as a pride of lions.

“Thank you for this,” said Ozorne, leaning on a railing and looking at the sleeping forms of the small hobby hawks on their perches. “It’s not often I feel certain enough in someone to request a private moment of their time. Those in our positions, they’re often so …” He sought for the word he was looking for. “… stilted. It’s been a pleasure to realise you’re as kind as Cole spoke of you being.”

Don felt quite odd about this compliment. He wasn’t a man who garnered many compliments, for obvious reasons, but now he had them coming he didn’t know what to do with them. He just smiled and looked at Ozorne, noting how lithe he was, the hard lines of his muscles.

Oh no, he thought. I refuse to be attracted to this man. Even if he _is_ a hopeless flirt.

“It’s lonely, isn’t it?” asked Ozorne, eyes still on the hawks. “Ruling so young, I mean. I lost my own father when I was very small. Killed by foul people, much as your poor mother was. Some groups … they’re not worth the space in our countries we give them.”

Don thought of his mages, who he’d failed.

“I don’t know who is behind my mother’s death,” he said. He joined Ozorne at the railing, keeping an appropriate distance between them.

“Mages, I was told.”

“A mage, yes, but I don’t know what group encouraged the act. That mage wasn’t a representative of all mages.” Don realised Ozorne had turned to face him and did the same, the two of them standing in the gloom of the sleeping mews together. “I would have thought your sympathies would have been with the mages, seeing as you are one.”

“University trained,” admitted Ozorne. He yawned and stretched, looking so abruptly human in his exhaustion that Don was thrown out of his train of thought. “I just know what it’s like to have seditious forces working against me in my own country. Nothing you do to your mages could possibly surmount the collective trauma that a treasonous uprising will cause your people, I promise, as someone who has put down more than my fair share of rebellions. I feel we are kin, Donatien. Crowned young, both so very alone on our thrones.”

“I have my queen,” said Don with a smile, as though wistful while thinking of her. “She is a great source of strength.”

“Ah,” said Ozorne. He was examining his shoes, it seemed, until Don realised that he was actually watching Don coyly through lowered lashes. It shouldn’t have worked as well as it did; the man was unfairly pretty. “She’s a love match, then? You’re very lucky.”

Don flinched.

“It was my understanding, though.” Ozorne’s voice was so low Don almost had to bow towards him to hear, but something kept him back. A sliver of something in the other man’s voice that was at odds with his charming demeanour. “That your tastes ran somewhat contrary to someone as glorious as your lovely Alianora. That they were more … circumspect.”

Neither of them spoke.

“Perhaps we’re kin in more ways that you imagine,” Ozorne murmured, straightening and closing the gap between them. Don looked around, uneasy with their proximity. “Harried by Tortall, alone in our desires …”

“Tortall threatens you?” Don asked, bemused – and ignoring what he was certain was, as unused to it as he was, a proposition. “How? They’ve a navy, certainly, but it’s not as powerful as their land forces, and they can’t keep both at full occupancy. If they’re manoeuvring on my borders, it must be to the neglect of yours. You’ve an ocean between you and all the power there.”

Ozorne, for a moment, seemed annoyed. Then he eased back, shrugging with insolent ease. The shadows caught his face oddly, turning him alien and strange.

“They offend more than threaten me,” he amended. “They harbour Carthakian criminals with no recourse for extradition. A traitor to my reign. Like I said.” He smiled. Don wasn’t so sure it was a nice smile anymore. “Their king has little care for the possessions of others. I hear he flaunts my traitor as a fancy court mage now, a painted pet. Perfectly at ease with the snake he’s invited home.”

Don tried to think of Tortallan court mages, certain that there must be more than the one he knew. But he kept coming up blank, except for the obvious ones that wouldn’t fit that description, such as the Lioness or the university mage Don had met with their delegation. And, eventually, he decided to gamble on it.

“You surely cannot mean Numair Salmalín?” he asked with all the nonchalance of speaking of nothing of importance. Ozorne went rigid. “You do! Astounding. I’d have never considered him a danger. He’s a rather silly man, from what I know of him.”

“When I knew him, he was Arram,” said Ozorne in a voice like the snake he’d called Numair, as furious as Constant had been speaking to Cole. “He’s a liar, Donatien. As two-faced and weak-minded as the king he serves under. Everything he does is an act. He is also a Black Robe mage, one of the most powerful in the world.”

That, Don hadn’t known. He wondered if Savigny did.

“Make no mistake,” said Ozorne. “Arram Draper – _Numair_ – is a grave danger to anyone in Tortall’s path. If Jonathan wishes it, Draper will burn Galla to the ground without breaking a sweat, before moving onto Carthak.”

“You make him sound like a weapon,” said Don through his dry mouth.

“He is,” said Ozorne simply. “We went to university together. We were friends, even. But he wished to be a war mage, to use his astounding gifts to cause momentous harm. I wouldn’t give him the opportunity he craved so he revealed himself as a traitor, pretending to be my companion to gain the power my throne would give him – and then he fled for Tortall before I could nullify the threat he posed, where he now serves as the sword of Jonathan’s power-madness. Or did you think Jonathan was content in his supremacy now he has the Dominion Jewel?”

“I try not to think about Tortall’s control of the Dominion Jewel,” Don confessed, quite honestly.

“You and every other country within an army’s march of her,” said Ozorne grimly. “Tortall holds this world in its grasp. I don’t think that’s right. But, what can I do? What can any of us do? Jonathan has a world-breaking magical artifact at hand, and he has a mage with enough Gift to power it for a century. I fear the future, Don. I fear what Jonathan will do, but not as much as I fear Arram Draper.”

He rubbed his eyes, looking exhausted. Don watched him. It didn’t seem an act. The man seemed worn thin. And he’d called Don Don, which was either a slip or an offer of friendship, or a grievous insult.

“No one is safe where that traitor lurks,” Ozorne muttered, dropping his hand and leaning back against the wall, eyes closed. Head tipped back. Don looked away from the fine arch of the other man’s throat.

“Well,” said Don, deciding to step lightly, “it’s lucky that this Arram is in Tortall then, not here.”

“Luckier than you know,” said Ozorne.


	39. Compromise and Confession: A Dream, Interrupted.

One of the otters was sick. Don summoned Daine, who came immediately. For all that he was worried for his darling, sitting with Daine as she quietly handled the listless otter was the most peace Don had had for months. Sleepily, he sat by the river, one finger drifting in the water, and watched her work.

“No word from Savigny?” he asked, already knowing the answer from the look she gave him. “Don’t stare at me so. I’m worried about him …”

“He’s fine,” she said tersely, opening the otter’s mouth to check her teeth and throat.

Don didn’t answer for a moment, just watched.

Eventually, he said, “We never spend time together anymore, you and I. I miss us.”

Daine’s confident hands stalled for a moment, something odd crossing her face. “I miss us too,” she said with a sigh, stroking the otter. “And this one has a cold. I could burn it out, if you’ll not string me up as a witch for doing it. Otherwise, it won’t be a long one. She’s fought it off mostly already.”

Don winced. He’d done his best to undo the damage of his first four years as king, but he knew it was going to be a long time before he was successful. A long and complicated journey stretched tediously before him. Though, he also knew it begun here, winning his people back one by one.

“Constant has magic, doesn’t he?” he asked. Out of everyone, Don had always longed the hardest for Daine’s magic. Oh, how far he’d go if he could grow wings – he didn’t think he’d ever come back. Daine was staring at him now, open-mouthed, the otter curling up in her lap. “I’m not silly. That Immortal creature of his, it loathes everyone but him. And I’ve seen him doing increasingly odd things with his eagle when he thinks no one is looking.”

“Like what?” asked Daine.

That was a question Don wasn’t wholly ready to answer, as he wasn’t certain Constant had been doing _anything_. But it was inarguably strange for the boy to sit himself below the free-flying eagle, eyes closed as though he was asleep despite sitting up as the eagle whirled above him like a child with a kite. And, there was the way Constant sometimes walked into the mews and every bird turned its head to look at him …

“Sometimes I wonder if he’s flying _with_ the eagle,” Don said, wiggling with embarrassment as Daine kept staring at him. It sounded insane, put like that. But he knew Daine would never mock him, unlike some. “It’s just … the way he is. It’s very hard for me to explain, but it reminds me of some of the exercises Sav used to have to do for Cole.”

“He might be,” said Daine finally, sighing. “He _shouldn’t_ be though. Numair will have his head for putting his mind outside his thick skull without supervision. You’re back to normal then?”

Don raised his eyebrows at her.

“Not all filled with someone else’s hate,” she amended. “A few months ago you’d have probably had him arrested. I saw how you looked at Numair, when he used his Gift in front of you to save Constant.”

If Don tried to think back to that day, all he managed to recall was a haze of fear and horror. It really was as though he’d been living with someone else’s brain. He was distracted, however, by the sleeping form in his own lap, who’d woken up and mumbled irritably for something to eat.

He fed her a strawberry without thinking about it before turning his attention back to Daine once she was quietly chewing on it. Daine, however, had now been distracted by this reminder of their guest.

“I don’t think you’ve ever properly introduced us,” said Daine, nodding to the sleepy and now strawberry-coated Miel, who had finally put on the weight her poverty had denied her. She was a chubby, glossy-haired darling of a toddler, and Don was truly alarmed by how much he loved her. “Numair said you’d made a little friend.”

“Miel de Honey-Nose,” Don said with a smile, bouncing her in his lap. She giggled, crushing the leftover strawberry in her hand. “She’s a palace ward. Miel, come see Aunt Daine.”

He wiped her as clean as he could using the corner of his shirt and handed the toddler over, accepting the poorly otter in return. Daine was sterner than he was. When Miel, eyes wide, reached for a lock of Daine’s hair, she got a sharp scolding and a washcloth to the face Don hadn’t seen Daine harbouring on herself.

“As much as I hate to ask,” said Daine in between interrogating Miel on the correct way to eat a strawberry, “is there … news?” She scrunched her face at Miel, making the baby giggle, but Don knew she was also struggling for the words she needed. “On the making me an aunt front, I suppose is what I’m trying to ask.”

Don winced. Savigny had never responded to his bird.

“These things take time,” he said diplomatically, but diplomacy had never worked on Daine. She began to tie Miel’s hair back using a spare leather thong from her pocket, to try save it from the worst of Miel’s grubby hands. The whole time, her gaze was locked on Don, and it was terribly discerning. “I’m not saying it’s _fun_. But we’re doing our duty.” And then he offered a delicate truth, one that he was relieved to finally share with someone: “It helps to know there’ll be a child at the end of it. I’ve always longed to be a father.”

He looked at Miel, who was smiling at him. His heart felt bigger at the sight of her grin.

“But you’re not happy about it,” was Daine’s response, quiet as it was.

Don shrugged. “It’s not the dream I wanted, but few people get their childhood dreams. Whatever happens to get there, at the end Nora will place a child in my arms and I’ll present them proudly to my people. That’s all that matters. No matter my mistakes, I will give Galla an heir to be proud of. An heir they will love, though not as much as I will.”

Daine looked down at Miel. “And those like you and I,” she whispered to the baby, leaning her lips against the curly hair in a brief and longing kiss, “we’re left to march our own paths no matter how noble those are that love us, without birthrights to guide us. Maybe we’re better off for it.”

Miel babbled, blissfully ignorant.

Don was curious at this turn in the conversation. “Do you have aspirations beyond your life now?” he asked. “I mean, you’ve been unwell for so long, with your magic. But it seems quite calm now. Have you considered what you’ll do?”

Daine’s eyes were downcast, locked on the baby, though Don suspected it was to avoid looking at him.

“I thought about working for the palace, like you’ve offered me,” she confessed, Don opening his mouth to gleefully extol all the benefits he’d shower upon her if she agreed to come home to him – but she wasn’t done: “But I don’t think it’ll suit, anymore. Even though it’s getting better here, every day. I just don’t think I’m built for it, tagging after royalty my whole life. I want … I want to be more than the background charity case in yours and Savigny’s life while you both do such big brave things. I think I want to see more.”

“Oh,” said Don. He was thoughtful for a moment, before something struck him. He’d remembered, suddenly, his wedding. Mostly driven by the flick of anxiety this gave him, the horror of her saying yes, he tried an idle, “You’re thinking of travelling then? Just in Galla? I could employ you to do so, if you’d like. We could do great things together, with my coin and your magic …”

But she looked at him.

“Ah,” he whispered. “Tortall, then?”

Daine shifted uncomfortably, sitting up on her knees so she could set Miel onto the ground. Miel was dirty enough by now that a little more grime wouldn’t matter; either way, Don was going to have to find a way to clean her before he returned her to the creche. The matrons there did not mind scolding their king for returning their charge covered in otter muck. “I don’t know, maybe,” she muttered, cheeks flushed bright red. “There’s a lot I could learn.”

And how, thought Don, hiding a smile. Though he supposed this meant Numair was considering returning home, if Daine was wondering about accompanying him. Savigny would be heartbroken.

The door opened, Constant striding in with the dogs following. Don hadn’t seen him in some days, his delight now in having both his favourite people showing, he knew, on his face. Unfortunately, judging from Constant’s expression, he wasn’t here simply to see them.

“What are you doing?” he asked Don, standing before them with his hands scrunched awkwardly against his sides, rigid and unhappy.

Don looked at the otter in his lap. It seemed quite obvious what he was doing.

“Sky has a cold,” he said, holding his sickly otter up. Daine took the otter from him, leaving Don’s hands free to stop Miel from flinging herself face-first into the small river in a quest for stones small enough to get her entire mouth over. “Daine is –”

“No, not with the fish ferret,” was Constant’s stormy response. “With _Ozorne_.”

Both Daine and Don blinked at him.

“I’ve watched you.” Constant kept moving his arms, clearly uncertain where he was supposed to put them while scolding a king. If he hadn’t been so obviously unhappy, Don would have offered advice; however, he wasn’t fool enough to speak out of turn right now. If Constant’s temper was anything like Savigny’s, he didn’t want to get on the wrong side of it. “You and him, all … _cozy._ He flirts with you, all the time. And it’s _weird_ , don’t you see how fake he is? It’s like he’s pretending to be someone else until you walk away and then he goes cold and horrible. He saw you with Miel –”

“I took her to dinner,” Don protested at Daine’s curious glance. He didn’t ask where Constant had learned what flirting looked like; he wasn’t certain he could handle the answer. “I wanted her to taste new things!”

“– and I heard him call her a gutter brat,” Constant finished, voice wounded. “He called her a _brat_. She could hear him! I saw her smile at him!”

Don looked at Miel, who fortunately hadn’t quite managed the intricacies of speaking just yet. She could say ‘og’ when she wanted Earnest to lick her, and she’d mastered the demanding ‘orp’ when she wanted to possess whatever it was that Don was holding. ‘Bises’ she knew when he said it, though she hadn’t tried to say it yet because as soon as he said it, she’d pucker her lips ready to kiss whoever got close to her first – usually Don or Numair, though Earnest had managed to get in a few times. She hadn’t quite figured out ‘His Majesty, King Donatien’, but Don had been quietly whispering ‘Don’ to her whenever he had a moment alone with her, to see if that got her started. Until then, he was pretty content to also be called ‘og’, since at least there he was in good company.

“Don’t worry,” Don told Miel firmly, a small simmer of anger sparking in his chest. “If anyone ever calls you a brat in my hearing, I’ll exile them to the bottom of the ocean. See how they like being nibbled by fish for their crimes.”

“Isph,” blurbled Miel.

“A new word!” Don crowed, holding her up. “She’s a genius!”

“Og,” said Miel, pointing to Earnest, which unfortunately caused Earnest’s poor brain a considerable amount of strain as he saw her pointing finger and tried to figure out what command she’d given him. He, like Miel, had not quite mastered spoken languages yet. Eventually, after turning in a circle and whining, he decided to sit with one paw in the air.

The others ignored him.

Don lowered her. “Constant, whatever Ozorne’s plans are, I’m not a part of them. I know he’s, uh …”

“Flirting,” said Constant. “Earnest, stop it. Put your paw down.”

Earnest flopped onto his back, belly on show and tail wagging. Both Daine and Bon Bon gave him exhausted looks.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” was Don’s terse response. “He’s certainly trying to ingratiate himself to me. It’s just politics. I must simply play along.”

“You won’t _do_ anything though, will you?” Constant asked.

Don almost laughed, but he managed to bite it back because he knew the hysterical tone of it would frighten them both. “Don’t worry,” he managed. “I’m barely handling warming the one bed. I’ve no intention of inviting another into my life.”

“Good,” snapped Daine. “Don’t trust him. He’s monstrous.”

They both looked at her, startled. It was, Don realised, the first time he’d seen her since Ozorne had arrived, and now he wondered if she knew something he didn’t.

“Daine,” said Don warningly, seeing her flush again, though this time with barely suppressed anger. “If you’ve information that’s needful …”

Daine looked at the dogs, and then at Miel. Finally, she looked at Don.

“It’s about Numair,” she said, deflating.

“I thought it was,” said Don quietly. “Tell me.”

So she did.

Nora found Don giving Miel a surreptitious wash in his wet room, attempting unsuccessfully to scrub otter muck from her pinafore.

“Why you feel the need to go and roll her in the animal pens, I’ll never understand,” said Nora, striding over to grab Miel’s kicking leg before her foot gave Don a concussion.

“It’s lonely, being small,” said Don distractedly. He was still thinking of what Daine had told him, and he was thinking of Constant’s odd expression throughout the entire sordid tale. “I always found a great comfort in animals. She’ll be a happier mot if she does too, no matter where her life takes her.”

Nora sat down, watching Don with Miel. She didn’t speak, not at first, which was good as his mind was taken up with thoughts of a younger Numair, tormented by the man he’d loved. There was no doubt in his mind that it was Numair’s tale that was the true one; he’d watched Ozorne and seen how false the charm he wore was. What was more, now Don knew the history behind the two men, he suspected that the practiced charm Ozorne knew so well was him mimicking Numair, a man who didn’t need to feign kindness to convince people of his good intentions.

“We should talk,” said Nora.

“Awful lot of people telling me that today,” muttered Don. “Isn’t that right, honey-bee?”

“Ba,” said Miel.

Nora made a sound, Don saying quickly, “I’m sure she means baa, like a lamb. A baa-lamb, baby?”

“Ba,” said Miel again, firmer this time, and she pointed to him to be sure he knew.

Don looked at Nora.

Nora, oddly, looked stricken. “I’m not pregnant,” she said. Don swallowed; he’d guessed. “That’s what I think we should talk about. I’ve spoken to the viscount, Pech.”

“Lord, now,” managed Don through his nausea. “He holds Darragon. I can’t imagine what you’d have found to speak with about though, the man is a –”

Nora held up a waxed-paper twist, silencing Don. Neither spoke. It was an awful moment.

“He said you hadn’t told him what you wanted the powder for,” said Nora into the dreadfulness. “When I pressed, he confessed that it’s a hypnotic. Is my bed so terrible that you’d drug yourself into a stupor just to share it?”

Don was trembling, trying to control it by scooping Miel up and cuddling her close. He loved her little hands around his neck and the soft sound of her breathing as she laid her head on his shoulders, eyelashes fluttering. So sleepy and soft, and so vulnerable in a world that was terrible. He loved her; he longed for his own Miel, with his blonde curls and a smile that was all Sav –

He shook himself, correcting that thought.

A smile that was all the child’s mother’s, of course.

“I don’t like sex, Nora,” he confessed, tensing. He was certain that she’d berate him for this with all the hatred she had pent up inside her, all the torment she lashed him with every time he disappointed her. “I never have. Not even with Savigny. And I find it even more difficult when it’s an act of duty, when I feel as though neither of us has any choice in engaging or not – I have so little agency, so little reality in my life, it feels like it’s stripping both those things from me without my pleasure or my consent. I can mechanically arouse myself and I thought … I thought, perhaps, initially, that was how we’d achieve our heir. But it’s simply, it’s just. It’s so _difficult_ when there’s another person involved. I find it – not you – repulsive. I don’t know why.”

He buried his mouth into Miel’s hair, swaying her as he took the excuse to turn away from Nora’s dire stare. A ruined king, ruining them again. They were nothing without an heir.

“The drug will remove my mind from proceedings,” he whispered, hating Nora’s intake of breath behind him. “I didn’t think to ask you. I presume my feelings on the matter are of little importance to you.”

“I am …” Nora trailed off, breathing deep before charging forward. “Bis – Don.” He looked at her, shocked. Had she called him that before? But, there she was, hands gripping her knees so tight over her skirts that he could see the skin below her nails whitening. “I hated you, you know. When we married. I was so certain that this match, this marriage – it would be so easy for me. No matter what happened, you could be relied on to be unimportant, a puppet king. I could do as I pleased because, yes, your feelings, they meant nothing to me. You were a tyrant, after all.”

Her hands loosened and she sagged in on herself, settling them instead on her lap.

“Don,” she said again, “I’m sorry.”

He stared.

“I treated you as a thing, as nothing but a part of this system that I hate. Perhaps you are, but you’re also a person and I’ve been abominable to you. I knew you were finding our … coupling … traumatic. I could see it in your eyes … and I thought it was an act of strength, of power, for me to laugh and dismiss it. But I was wrong and I’m realising this. Revenge doesn’t make us strong, and it certainly doesn’t make me feel powerful or wise. I feel sick thinking of how I … I just, I wish I could go back. I don’t hate you now. I’m just so very sad that it’s taken me three months of being your wife to stop being so stupid, to realise that you’re so very human and able to be hurt, and that I’ve hurt you.”

“I don’t mind,” Don managed, feeling wrung out. She gave him a shocked look. “I mean, not the rest of it – I mind about that. Very, very much. I mean, I don’t mind Biscuit. If you want to call me that.” He walked over to the seat she was sitting on, which was really only made for one but which she shuffled across to let him join her on it anyway, helping him ease the dozing Miel down across their laps. “I think, maybe, we should start again, as husband and wife. We’ve made mistakes.”

Nora nodded, gazing down at Miel. She touched the child’s cheek, tracing the line of it. Fixing a stray curl and straightening the cuff of her shirt.

“I’ve never wanted a child,” she confessed, eyes still on Miel. “Seeing you with this one, I realised that. I see how you look at her, the way you light up in anticipation of everything she does. I still don’t think I want a child like you do, but since I’m to have one I’m glad you’ll be the father of it. I just …” Her shoulders, against his, straightened. She took another breath, expression turning determined. “Donatien – Biscuit – we’ve already run roughshod over tradition. If someone were to hand you Miel and give you the care of her, would you consider yourself her father in everything that mattered?”

“Yes,” replied Don, startled. “But that won’t work. She’s known in the palace, and she’s older than our marriage. The nobles would never –”

Nora silenced him with a look. “I’m not referring to Miel herself,” she said, grimacing. “I’m referring to … well, no one but the gods would know. All we need is me pregnant. And I don’t think I can lay in your bed again and see how much it hurts you and still call myself a moral being.”

The world seemed to have briefly spun out of control, Don’s mind scattering as he tried to fathom what she was saying. Then he fathomed it.

Then he tried not to.

“The gods truly would smite us,” he breathed, horrified but intrigued. “Nora, we can’t. I’ve a duty to the spiritual, and they would _not_ be pleased.”

“Nonsense,” was her short response. “We make offerings to the Mother. She has no love for rape, and if she’s had any eyes on us at all she’d be hard pressed to argue that what happened in our bedroom _wasn’t.”_ Don opened his mouth, but she shouldered him gently and reminded him, “You cried.”

“I was drunk,” he muttered. Nora raised her eyebrows, but he ignored her. “Oh, it’s hopeless anyway. As soon as it got out, we’d be pariahs.”

“Unless it doesn’t get out.” Now, her expression was truly worrying, and Don gave her a look that warned her how uncomfortable he was with it. “No, don’t stare like that. I’m just … yes, it’ll have to be someone loyal. Someone who’d never expose you, or us. We’ll need absolute trust.”

The cold was back. The nausea. Don was no fool, even if he was often foolish.

“No,” he said.

She tried to argue.

“No!” he snarled, trying to stand. Miel whimpered and he was forced to stay where he was, but it was a struggle. Horror, fear, disgust, loathing: he battled them all, and he was losing. “Nora, you can’t – how _dare_ , it, _no_.”

“He’d never tell,” she whispered. She was shaking too, he realised. Perhaps she feared his temper, or perhaps this concept horrified her too. The audacity was nauseating. “He’d cut out his tongue before he exposed you. And, you must admit – there’d be no one else who’d understand why we need him like he would.”

Don stared at her. His breath came hard. Brain buzzing horribly.

“Pech,” he stammered, seeing Nora blink. “I’ve few loyalists, but Pech is one.”

“Your sister’s husband?! Are you _mad?_ ”

He waved that off. “She’s not loyal to him,” he said dismissively. “And she treats him horrendously. He’s nobility, he’s trustworthy, and he’s subtle. And …” He met her gaze, grimacing but plunging ahead anyway: “… and he’s not Savigny. Nora, you can’t ask Savigny.”

“He’d do it,” was her short response.

She was right. Savigny would. There wasn’t a thing Savigny wouldn’t do for their kingdom, if not their king.

This was exactly why Don could never ask it of him.

“Perhaps it’s better I don’t know,” he decided, closing his eyes and looking away from her before opening them again, in case he saw her decision in her expression. “Do as you must, but pick wisely. If this gets out … we’ll be ruined. And don’t tell me.”

Nora nodded, sliding out from under Miel and standing. She brushed down her skirts. She took an uncertain step back.

And she said, softly, “You know, no matter who it is, when that baby is born, it’s your arms who’ll hold it with me. You’ll never doubt that, will you? Even if we never manage to become friends, you’ll always be the father. Nothing can take that from you.”

All Don could manage was a weak smile. It seemed to be enough. Nora took her leave.

He sat with Miel in the darkening room, trying to think of nothing and being thoroughly unsuccessful. 

In the end, Don hadn’t been able to face taking Miel back to the creche. Not after the afternoon he’d just had. Instead, he’d laid her down to sleep in his bed and he was now slouched before the fire, avoiding having to leave his rooms and face Ozorne, or anybody else.

There was a knock at the door.

Constant sidled in, sans dogs. That should have been Don’s first clue that what was going to follow was devastating, but he was already overwhelmed on this day.

“I’ve a headache, Connie,” murmured Don, still staring into the fire. “I truly can’t entertain right no –”

“It’s true what Daine said about Ozorne, isn’t it?” said Constant, his voice duller than ever. Don sat bolt upright, studying his young friend and finding that Constant’s eyes were swollen, the whites reddened. He smelled of the mews and had a still-bleeding chunk taken out of one hand, which implied he’d been down with the Immortal bird creature, Rum. That was the only bird that would bite him.

“I believe so,” said Don cautiously with a glance at the sleeping Miel. “I’m sorry. It’s terrible to learn that people we love have been mistreated so –”

“But you won’t make him leave court.”

Don blinked. Constant was glaring, his expression livid despite his watery eyes. Uneasy, he said, “I can’t. It would be … messy.”

“But you haven’t accepted his gifts yet,” Constant demanded, taking a single step forward. “You _could_. You could tell him Galla stands strong alone and send him home, before he realises Numair is here. He’s putting Numair in _danger_ by being here – Daine said Numair’s certain that Ozorne will have him killed if he discovers him. Why won’t you protect him!?”

“Constant,” breathed Don, standing and striding towards his friend, who dodged his attempt to embracing him. “Darling, what’s happened? Did Ozorne do something to you?”

“No!” shrilled Constant, wincing as Miel mumbled in her sleep. Quieter, he gasped, “No! You have! You’re just letting him _stay._ You’re supposed to protect us!”

Don was silent, considering this. It wasn’t like Constant, who had taken to the politics of the palace like a fish ferret to water. In some ways, he was cannier than Don was; he’d never suggest Don insult a powerful potential enemy where there was a possibility for a beneficial relationship instead.

“Who didn’t I protect?” he asked carefully.

“All of us!” wept Constant, who was crying now. Don shivered, the icy touch of his horror trickling down his spine. Something terrible had happened, he knew. Something he’d been blind to. It was all too much. “You’ve failed _all_ of us. What good is a king who lets people get so hurt?”

And, bawling, he crumpled forward into Don’s chest, who held him as tenderly as if he was Miel, rocking him gently until his breathing was coming easier and the madness of the grief had passed.

“Now,” Don murmured into the silence that followed the last great gasp of Constant gathering his breath, “tell me what you’ve discovered. I can’t turn back time, but I can certainly bring justice. I promise.”

Constant didn’t immediately answer. He just stayed huddled against Don’s chest, sniffling, which was the most startling return to the Constant of old that Don couldn’t bear to push him away. He’d missed Constant’s innocence very much, and though this was hardly the circumstances to take pleasure in its return, he was glad for the indication that there was still some Constant deep in there.

“It’s Cole,” said Constant, finally. Don frowned. Had Ozorne hurt Cole? Why hadn’t he said …

And then he thought of the way Constant had stared at the old man and the cold, this time, was crippling. He tightened his grip on Constant. He didn’t want to know; he needed to know; he didn’t think he could handle knowing.

“Who?” Don managed. His first thought, horribly, was _Daine_. She’d been treated so terribly when she’d first arrived, and after that she had such strange moments of sheer vulnerability –

“Sav,” whispered Constant. So quietly Don almost didn’t hear him. So quietly that, even though he _had_ heard him, Don still thought he might have to ask him to repeat himself because what he’d said was impossible. “Cole hurt Sav. Numair told me to be careful of him and I didn’t know what that meant, but I made Daine tell me. I told her Cole frightened me and she had to tell me because I was worried he was going to do the same to me. I lied, Don. I lied to her because I needed to know, and now I do, and he hurt my _brother_.”

“Impossible,” was Don’s shaky answer. “Savigny is in Hartholm and Cole’s only been back –”

“When you were kids,” Constant monotoned. “He’s been hurting him since Savigny first went to him.”

Don let go. He stumbled back. He sunk into a crouch, unsure if his knees were holding him too well, and then managed to drag himself upright and tip onto the bed, where he sat holding himself steady with both hands bunched into the bedding. It had to be false. Someone had gotten it wrong. Cole loved them.

“He twisted Sav’s Gift up,” continued Constant without a care for how shaken Don was. “He made it so using magic burned him …

_… “What’s that?” Don asked, leaning closer to touch the puckered skin of Savigny’s arms. Savigny twisted away, irritation lining his face. They were supposed to be studying. Mother would be mad if Don failed his music tutelage again. But he’d asked Savigny to make birds with his Gift and Savigny, who loved to entertain, had made the most spectacular ones Don had ever seen. “Did you burn yourself?”_

_“No,” said Savigny shortly. “It’s nothing. It’s just …_

… and told him it was happening because his Gift was rejecting him, for being broken up and twisted inside …

… _“There’s something wrong with me,” Savigny whispered, a shadow in the dark. Don peered at him. They weren’t supposed to sneak through the palace at night, but, somehow, Don had known Sav was upset, and he’d snuck up to his room. Here, he found he was right, Sav curled onto his hearth with his thin arms wrapped around his head, shaking horribly. Don crept closer to the older boy, touching his shoulder._

_“I don’t think there’s something wrong with you,” he tried, though Sav gave a horrible, hoarse laugh at it. “You’re my Gift. You’re perfect.”_

_Savigny began to cry …_

… and he used a compulsion to set it in. A compulsion, Don!” Constant was hyperventilating again, looking so stricken that Don would have gotten up to hold him again if he’d been capable of standing without his woozy head and shaky grip on his temporal reality holding him down.

“I would have known if he was compelling Sav,” Don managed, gripping the blankets tight. “We were together in every waking moment, he couldn’t have _possibly_ done it without –”

“He was using fire opals,” said Constant faintly.

Don flinched …

… _“They’re a teaching aid, prince,” said Cole, holding out the glittering stones. “Pretty, aren’t they?”_

_“They make my eyes hurt,” Don grumbled. “Can’t I learn music without them?”_

_Cole laughed, placing the stone on the table besides the pile of sweets that Don eyed greedily. “Precedent implies that no, no you cannot,” he said. “You haven’t Sav’s love of song, I’m afraid.”_

_Don snuck a glance at Sav, who’d fallen quiet. He was staring at the opal Cole had given them, his expression dazed._

_“Sav,” said Don, elbowing him. Sav looked at him, blinking stupidly, like he’d been woken up without warning. “Tell Cole I can learn without a teaching aid because I’m smart.”_

_“I don’t feel well,” Sav whispered._

_Don was alarmed, but Cole sighed and said, “Too many sweets again, Savigny. I did warn you.”_

_“But you didn’t have any,” whispered Don to Sav, who was looking bewildered again. “Sav? Sav …_

“Sav,” said Don, stunned. He’d ridden to the Hartholm estate on a whim, intending to speak to Daine about what Constant had revealed. But he’d walked in and found not Daine, as he’d expected, but Savigny standing in the stables looking shocked. The two of them stared at each other, Sav’s hand flickering up to rub his jaw before he let it drop. He’d grown his facial hair out, which was an extremely odd sight. Don wasn’t sure he’d ever seen him with facial hair before. “How long have you been back?”

Sav didn’t immediately answer, which was answer enough.

“Ah,” said Don, sagging. “You’ve been home all along. I see.”

“I was unwell,” said Savigny stiffly, touching his jaw again before snapping his hands behind his back and standing awkwardly facing Don. Don flinched at the reminder of his dredged-up memories that had chased him all the way here. “I’m sorry.”

Don didn’t know what to say. He’d ridden here wanting Daine, who he could talk to about these things, and instead he’d found Savigny. How was he supposed to explain what he knew now?

He decided, eventually, on bluntness.

“Constant told me about Cole,” he said, Savigny tilting his head with polite confusion on his features. His face looked odd, Don noticed. It was very subtle, but Don had spent most of his life looking at Savigny’s face and he knew it better than he’d known his mother’s. There was something alien about it. He brushed it aside, blaming the disparate lighting in here. “About what Cole did to you, when we were small.” Because he was a coward, he looked at his shoes instead of Savigny as he said the last, hearing Sav’s small gasp. “About … he did it to us, didn’t he? Not just you. Constant said there were fire opals, and I remember …”

“A teaching aid,” Savigny whispered.

Don struggled with a smile, trying to lighten the horror of this betrayal. “I truly was terrible at music, wasn’t I?”

Sav just stared, his mouth without emotion but his eyes stricken. He said, “I was terrible at obedience.”

That struck like a blow to the heart, Don taking a step back. There was no softening it with humour, no rationalising it in his head; if this was true, and Don knew it was, then Cole had used magic to manipulate and abuse Savigny into believing he was repulsive, into shying away from using the Gift he’d been blessed with, into … Don swallowed another surge of bile-flavoured horror, realising that by crippling Savigny’s magic, his belief in himself, the bond between him and Don, he’d crippled Don’s reign. Right from the start, he’d ensured Don was inheriting with a Gift who was less than he should have been. And there was Don’s hatred of magic, which to this day felt like someone else’s brain had overtaken his …

“Oh, Sav,” he breathed, striding forward and, for the second time that day, finding arms waiting. Sav hadn’t even hesitated; they were simply too familiar with each other. They stepped into each other’s embrace and held each other close, neither weeping as Constant had but both leaning heavily on the other. “I should have protected you. You were just a child.”

“You’re four years younger than me,” Sav said, tilting his face away from Don, Don assumed to hide his expression. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Don wasn’t so sure that was true.

“You never told me,” was his small, selfish accusation.

Sav broke into an uneven laugh. “I couldn’t! How could I? I was so certain that I’d be thrown out if my Gift failed me, and no one would ever want me if I wasn’t your Gift.”

That was impossible, Don thought. No matter what, Don would have always wanted Savigny with him. No matter what.

“Besides,” Sav sighed, his voice as heavy as though he’d carried this for so long he couldn’t believe he was being given the chance to voice it now, “Cole told me no one would ever love me like he did. I had to keep him happy. You know what that’s like, you more than anyone else … he was the only adult we had who cared. If we didn’t have him, who did we have?”

Don was silent. They both were, just huddled together in the uneven dark of the stables. So much between them but neither of them able to speak.

“We’ll do better with your children,” Savigny said, finally, his voice lighter now. Gentle, hopeful. Tentative. Don chanced a look at him and found him looking so soft Don could scream with frustration at everything their lives were denying them. “They’ll be wonderful, like we were, but they’ll have us. We won’t fail to protect them like our parents did us.”

“You think so?” asked Don, who wasn’t so sure anymore. He’d failed Sav, after all. Right from the start.

“No,” said Savigny firmly. “I don’t think so. I vow it to be so. Don, so long as I draw breath, nothing will ever harm your heirs. I might have failed as a Gift, and as a friend, but I’ll never fail this.”

Don nodded. He believed him.

“And I’ll protect yours,” he promised in return, tightening his grip around Savigny’s waist before letting go and stepping back. He’d meant to be fierce and intent, promising Savigny’s future children everything they needed to grow spectacularly, whatever he asked of him – but Savigny laughed.

“Ah, prince,” he said, shaking his head. “We both know my plans for children died with your marriage.”

“You can have them without me!” Don managed, breathless and dismayed.

“No,” said Sav quietly. “Why would I? That was our dream, not mine.”

There was little Don could say to that. So little he could say to any of it. Once again, events were conspiring to rip the small control he had over his life out of his hands. All he could do, and did, was to take Savigny’s hand, and treasure that small moment in the dark with him, alone, secure in the knowledge that this was one less secret thick between them.

The snows were late that year. They were almost at midwinter by the time the weather even seemed to be thinking of thickening, which kept Don in a state of depression. He loved the Winterlight celebrations that came with the first blanketing snow, which the tepid weather was denying him. But, all things came eventually, and so too did the snow.

And so too did everything else.

“It’s cold, prince,” complained Savigny, crunching across the icy paddock to where Don was standing against a fence, looking up at the far-away dot of a hawk circling ahead. “Why are you out here? Daine thinks you’ve gone mad.”

Don envied the hawk, its grace and its freedom. He envied Constant his ability to fly with the hawks, to know their minds so truly. Life for everyone else seemed so full and rich, bursting with beauty and strangeness. Life, for him, was nothing of the sort.

“Don?” asked Sav, coming to his side. Swaddled thick in a scarf Don knew he’d knitted himself, the ends always uneven when Savigny knitted his own. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong,” said Don quietly, watching the hawk. “Winter is here and I love winter. We’ll have snow soon. Nora’s pregnant.”

Sav went stiff for a moment. “Ah,” he said.

They both watched the hawk. Don considered asking the question on his tongue, but he knew that if Nora had decided not to approach Savigny, for whatever reason, that question would damn them. Nora was pregnant; Don hadn’t warmed her bed since the night it had made him ill.

No, Don decided. He wouldn’t ask. This way, he could form his own beliefs, decide for himself the shape of his reality. Maybe he could make it pleasant for once, decide that this was a dream he was still allowed. A child with Savigny’s dark hair and Nora’s fierceness, and perhaps the learned shape of Don’s smile …

A dream could still live, if one was ignorant enough.

He leaned his head on Savigny’s warm shoulder, the fog of their breathing mixing together. Savigny didn’t congratulate him and Don was glad. They stood there until the snow began to fall, dusting their dark clothes with white.

It was, Don decided, beautiful. Even for him.


	40. At the Dawn of Winterlight …

Don ran his palm over the silken grip of the rope, his face alight with a life that Nora had never seen in him before. Now she’d made her decision to pay attention to him, ho, what attention he demanded; she was astounded to realise that she’d married not a king, not a crown, but just a man, at the end of it. A man who cried when she hurt him and flinched when he anticipated pain. A man who took his socks off in his sleep and then complained every morning as he skipped across the flagstones that his toes were cold. He wouldn’t eat meat but always went for the sugared treats over the vegetables on offer, horrifying her with his lopsided diet; he called his ridiculous chickens his ladies-in-waiting and doted on them as though they were as fierce and spectacular as a herd of wild elk. Sometimes, when he thought he was alone with Miel, Nora would catch him dancing with her in giddying circles singing in Old Gallan about how he was a soldier in a war fighting to get home to his most wonderful girl. He sung beautifully but never for an audience other than the girl. He was eccentric, upsetting, infuriating, and baffling in equal measures, which was to say he was nothing like she’d expected a tyrant to be.

Nora, who’d determined to cast aside her girlhood the day she took a crown for her country, was upset to realise that her decision to become a martyr upon the lance of the Gallan throne wasn’t at all going to be a tragedy she’d expected. Elspeth had tried to warn her.

“He’s a boy, really,” Elspeth de Darragon had warned her as they’d plotted this, Adel – may the Black God cherish him as they had – smoking his pipe wordlessly. “Just a boy at his heart. Be kind to him.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” had been Nora’s furious retort. Their king was a spoiled boychild who too many people had been kind to. Spare the rod, spoil the king, she was sure.

Elspeth had given her _that_ look, the look that always made Nora shake her head in wonder that somehow these canny people had had a hand in raising Pech, before – every time – she’d remember that they’d had a daughter, once, who’d died. But that was part of being Gallan now, wasn’t it? At least, the nobles and noble adjacent. Each and every one of them had whole wardrobes of black, and even the babies knew the funeral dirges. They all knew the scent of the pyres and the tolling of the bells.

“You’ll see,” Elspeth had said.

Nora had been sure she was wrong.

But, here she was, holding a toddler of no breeding who had no parents and no birth record, watching the hateful king of Galla as he, barefoot, toes curled against the cold, still in his woollen sleepwear, touched the great rope of the winter bells. He looked so happy she felt like she would die at the sight of it, her throat closing too tight for her to imagine continuing past this moment. It wasn’t that she loved him, far from it; it was just a monumental shift in her world to have gone from the girl plotting to set tradition and the men who upheld it on fire, to a woman who was realising her husband was not an enemy but a partner in crime. Her entire life, she was suddenly making room for him in it, and she was befuddled by how much she didn’t loathe the concept.

“This is it, Miel,” said Don, gazing up at the bells with his expression starry. Miel, bundled so tight that she was positively round in Nora’s arms, looked up too, copying Don’s expression and gasping even though she had no idea what she was looking at. Every so often, the girl would glance to Don to make sure she was mimicking him appropriately, and Nora felt some intangible shift inside her as she imagined their child gazing at its father with that much unfathomable love.

Nora swallowed her emotions.

“I ring this bell and it’s Winterlight. It’s as simple as that.” Don looked at them and beamed, Nora couldn’t help but smile back. The feeling was infectious. “Shall we, my darlings?”

Both of them.

He was talking to both of them.

Nora walked over there, side by side with him. Miel warm and wiggly in her arms; a baby that was his quickening in her body; completely unprepared for how much it turned out she liked him, once she’d started paying attention to who he was not who he appeared to be. The throne was rotten, but it didn’t begin with Donatien. It had been rotten long before he’d been cursed with a birthright he’d never asked for. She touched the rope, which was warm from his hand. They hadn’t had a Winterlight since before his mother had died.

“It’s that easy, huh?” she said.

His smile faltered. She wondered why until she realised how she’d sounded, that once again she’d cut him when she’d wanted to communicate. Nora had been raised in a bakery, brawling with Rainary since they were old enough to swing a rolling pin at each other. She was used to a love language of floured hands teaching her how to beat the dough and shape the pastries. There had been no time or energy for soft words and gentle hearts, so Nora and Rain had taken love as it had come and never considered it needed to be shaped differently. Don, he wasn’t like that. Maybe not because the shape of his love had been spoiled by softness, she was beginning to realise, having seen the rooms that had once been his nursery and noticed how few toys, how little fun there was in them. His nest had been gilded, but babies had no need for the cold touch of gold.

If Nora loved him how her mother had loved them, he’d see it as rejection.

It was just hard, to learn how to be different. She wasn’t Daine. She’d didn’t know how to show a hound that her hands were different from the ones who had beaten it, and she especially didn’t know how to do that with a human.

I came here to fix a _country_ , she thought furiously, hating his missing smile, not a person!

“Cole said I shouldn’t have Winterlight, after Mother … died,” Don said, looking at the rope with his shoulders slumped. They were alone up here in the winter tower below the great Star of Galla; there was only room for four, if those four were close. Traditionally, only the rulers and their Gift and _maybe_ their children would come up here. Nora wondered how many of the household staff had conspired to smuggle Miel up here, knowing that many of them were secretly doing as much as possible to encourage the king’s adoration of his smallest ward. “He said it’s a celebration that invites too much devilry.”

“Because the mages light the city,” supplied Nora, shivering with anger.

“Three months ago I’d have defended him and pointed out that ours was a city then traumatised by mageworks,” Don mused. “I don’t feel inclined to anymore. I don’t think it’s as simple as rejecting the celebration of magic inherit in Winterlight – I think his advice was a rejection of the very core of the winter festival, of what it means to be Gallan. And I fell for it.”

Nora could have pointed out that he was ill then, as she’d been told he’d be and what she now, as she hadn’t originally, believed. She saw the ways his eyes sometimes focused on things that weren’t there, and the patterns of coping that he used to maintain his daily routine. The meditation he took in the morning was not for control of a Gift, but a mind, and she was careful not to break those patterns because she’d seen the way he didn’t bounce back from simple upsets like another would. But she didn’t say anything. He knew. She wasn’t his conscience, or his absolution. He had to find his own peace.

“This year is important, though,” said Don quietly. “I won’t have it stalled. Galla won’t fall, Nora. We’re too strong together – and that’s what Winterlight is about. No snow, no blizzard, no darkest night. We make our own light.”

“Do you know why I approached you?” she asked. He looked at her and didn’t say anything. “I mean, initially. To become queen. You’ve never asked me how I summoned the gall.”

He shrugged. “It was a good idea. And you’ve a future that’s bigger than your mama’s bakery.”

It gave her very strange feelings to have him say ‘mama’, as it occurred to her that he said the word as though it referred to a concept far different from the ‘mother’ he still grieved.

“I love the bakery. And there’s dreaming bigger than a bakery well below deciding to become a queen.” Nora handed him Miel, hesitating over whether she should help adjust his grip on the little meu. She shouldn’t have. He was more comfortable with babies than she was; she’d never held someone as small as the little Miel, having never had reason to consider littles. “Mine is a life shaped by powerful mamas. I’ve my own, who held her bakery together while raising two brats like me and Rainy after our Da died. She never faltered, just kept getting up every day before the crows to start the great fires all by herself – we couldn’t afford staff so early, not back then – while feeding us and teaching us our letters and numbers. She knew she’d need us to work for her, you know, but she still took the time to teach us more. I had my first lessons on economics and geopolitical relations while piping icing onto sweet biscuits. She had an attack in her heart, you know, a few years back. It was after your … you probably didn’t know.”

Don looked down. “I didn’t,” he murmured. “I’m sorry. I should have. Rain and I were friends, before she became a captain to a king.”

“Yes, well,” said Nora, feeling uncomfortable with sympathy. “She survived but went blind shortly after. And I knew I’d be a baker forever, because it wouldn’t be long before the bakery was mine. But all the troubles were beginning then, or had begun and I was just noticing. And Mama, gosh. She noticed so much more than me. She doesn’t talk much about Da, but I wonder who he was because I don’t know where she got all the smarts she did about things outside of a hearth. At some point, people started plotting for what happen when you invariably failed, either you’d be assassinated or there were some who were certain you were heading for the Black God’s Option. Many thought you already had and we just hadn’t been told because you had no heir. And with the nobles dying too, all potential heirs to the throne … Mama’s got odd friends, you know. People in the Bog, so many people in the Inner City, nobles. She’s a regular guest to Elspeth de Darragon. And Lady Elspeth, she can read this city like a scholar reads a book. Long before there was talk of revolution, she and her ladies – I don’t know who they are so don’t ask me – were talking about how to steer Cría neatly once more. It was their idea that you needed a solid marriage, so even if you failed there’d be sanity behind the throne. Mama told me there were other plots but the Lady flatly refused to be involved with them, since most of them involved stripping you of your throne and either she’s too fond or she knew that was a quick march to a civil war. Then it was a matter of who.”

Don was staring at her, open-mouthed. “And they chose you?” he asked, which wasn’t really what Nora had expected his first question to be as she told him his nobles plotted against him. Then again, probably he knew already. The only bit she was surprising him with was her involvement.

“Mama did,” said Nora with faux calm. Miel was playing with the bell pull and, even though Don was wholly focused on Nora, he’d shifted about to make sure his shoulder was between the meu and getting herself into trouble. “There weren’t really any noble options. I remember someone said it was a pity that Bette de Darragon had died as a mot and Adel – it was the first time he ever spoke, though he never missed a meeting – said there was nothing about it that was pitiful, or innocent. He said anyone who was poised to strengthen the Alaire line was a target. I remember it so vividly, even though I was barely fifteen then and didn’t realise he was saying Bette’s dying wasn’t an accident. She was supposed to be engaged to you, you know. Your mother and Adel agreed shortly after she was born.”

“I knew,” said Don softly, grimacing. “It wasn’t murder though. She died of a fever, when she was five. We all caught it, save Savigny. Pech lost three brothers.”

“Aye, well. Seems very horrible, doesn’t it, such a strange fast sickness that kills and goes.” Nora fiddled with her skirts, uncomfortably glad for her fur cloak she’d inherited in the wardrobe that came with being a queen. “And so class aware, seeing as it only hit Alaire Fief during the fostering, when all the peers sent their offspring to learn friendship with the lords ladies of their future ruling class. One home, every heir of Galla – including the six-year-old crown prince and his ten-year-old Gift. We’re a silly people, aren’t we?”

“You’re saying it –”

“Twelve babs dead,” she said with devastating finality. “All heirs or heir presumptive. And a handful of staff children who came into contact with those who nursed you. And Bette didn’t even put up a fight, I know. Elspeth told the story enough. She’s so _angry_ , Don, these plots have taken so much from her. All of you, especially those with Gifts, fought like bats to stay alive then, but Bette took a cough and then died without a whisper before they even realised she was ill. Crawled into her da’s lap and never woke up. You don’t think that’s odd? It neatly stopped Alaire and Darragon from intermarrying again, until your mother paired Solange with Pech. So many sick, except Savigny.”

“He wasn’t there,” said Don distractedly.

“No,” Nora said. “He wasn’t. That was the only year he wasn’t, wasn’t it? Because Cole took him away before anyone got sick.”

There it was. The same sick silence that had been infecting all conversations about Cole for weeks now, Don’s expression darkening. Miel didn’t like it; she saw his face turn stormy – stormier than the fat flakes of snow falling outside – and her own face fell, whimpering quietly.

“And there never were any more fosterings,” Nora added into the silence. “The first prince of Galla to grow up in isolation from his nobles. Never earning their love or their loyalty, or growing to know their strengths, their weaknesses. The Tortallans make their princes go through the knighthood to encourage the same fierce bonds of loyalty, to ensure their knights and nobles will fight to the death for their king. I always wondered how they could expect your people to care as much about you without it, until the Lady told me about Bette. _Our_ child won’t grow up so isolated, I promise you.” She reached out and touched his hand, which was warm through his glove, curling her own hands around it in a touch she hoped was comforting, knowing she could be cold. “That’s why I’m here, Biscuit. There aren’t any Gallan matches for you because someone made it so. They pushed your throne towards foreign powers and eroded your nobles’ love of you. We stand on a battlefield that begun with a five-year-old’s bones, long before anyone even knew we were in danger – and what noble would offer their own daughter up to that? But my mama would. My mama, perched perfectly between noble and common, she sees every part of this city from the Jewel to the Bog, and she saw me too. She loves me as best as she can, but she says to me, Nora, I’ve no right to love you so much that more mamas bury their mots just because they might one day marry a king. I’ve a mind she shaped and a fierceness she encouraged, but most of all I’m just noble enough to be possible, but not so noble I’m irreplaceable.”

Nora smiled sadly at the horror in his eyes.

“It’s not a pretty truth, but it’s all I’ve got for you,” she added. “But what I think you should take from this is that you’ve people who see you, Don. People who’d stand boldly behind you if they could. They might be hiding in the shadows, but they’re there – so determined to hold their hands out to you that they’ll help organise a marriage to a baker’s girl rather than let your line expire to another.”

They both looked to the rope and all it symbolised. It would wake the sleeping city; it would, Nora realised, do such much more than that. It was a clear cry that there was a king in the palace again. It would wake Galla up.

“Winterlight brings us together,” murmured Don, to himself. “We were strong once. We might not have a light anymore, but we’ll still make do.”

Don put one hand on the rope, hesitating. Then he looked at her. He didn’t say anything and he didn’t have to. She took the rope that he let fall, watching as he stepped back and used his scarf – it was wonky on the ends, she noticed, with a frown – to help cover Miel’s little ears. But his eyes never left hers, and so it was the new queen of Galla who pulled the first toll of Winterlight, summoning the snows upon them and warning her people that it was time to hold each other against the oncoming cold.

Numair was half-asleep, dazed and stumbling as Daine dragged him up the tight stairway that led up into the frozen steeple. She ignored his protestations at the cold, giving no explanation until they came to the top where Savigny was leaning on the sill with snow whirling around him. He’d dressed in a hurry, so fast that he hadn’t even set the complicated system of illusions he’d spent the last month building. It crooked his grin awkwardly, the vibrant scar that lashed across his face to end in a fish hook below the eye, but Numair was glad to see it; he hadn’t liked seeing Savigny vanish into himself in his desperation to hide what was now a part of him, no matter how hateful he found it.

“What are we doing?” Numair yawned, glancing up at the bell. He’d noticed it before as something most of the grander buildings had, and every temple, but eventually he’d discounted it as he’d never seen them used.

“Listen!” Savigny shouted into the bitter morning wind, slow blasting against them and making Daine squeak.

Numair listened, and he heard; fascinated, he walked beside Savigny and looked out into the dark, seeing the low clouds of an oncoming snowstorm and feeling the terrible mountain wind – and hearing, above it all, the deep, resonant cry of a great bell. It rang alone for twenty more peels, Numair fascinated by the waiting stillness.

“Wait for the light,” Savigny murmured. Numair glanced to Daine, who the comment had been aimed at, finding that she’d shimmied up the side of the bell and was unhooking the muffles from the clapper, unwinding a heavy rope that she let fall. Then she leapt down without fear, tossing the muffles and gesturing to Numair.

“You help me with the bell,” she demanded, Numair puzzled but going to her anyway. “Sav, you’ve got it?”

Sav just smiled, staring so hard in the direction of the palace he looked like he was about to start vibrating.

“We haven’t had a Winterlight in years,” Daine whispered to Numair, her eyes on Sav. “Don’s never lit the Star. I can’t believe he’s doing it!”

“I’ve no idea what’s happening,” Numair confessed, but Daine just laughed at him.

“Come on, Don,” she breathed, almost yanking on the bell accidentally as she tried to crane to stare in the same direction as Sav. “Oh, he’s not going to light it, is he? Do they even have a mage to do it? The Gift is supposed to, aren’t they? What’s the point of Winterlight without the Star!”

“It’s a mage light,” said Sav, though he didn’t look away. “They might not … there’s been opposition to Don’s shift on mages. It opposes that directly.”

“Do they have a _mage_ though?” Daine asked. “Cole won’t do it, I bet. That guttersnipe.”

“When is the light supposed to go?” Numair asked, squinting into the snow. “How many peels in?”

Savigny sucked in air through his teeth. Then he turned in place, grabbing for Numair’s hand.

It was the first time they’d touched since Numair had discovered he was Raven.

“Put your hand here,” Savigny instructed, setting Numair’s palm against the wall. “Feel it?”

Numair did. There was magic there, set deep into the stone. It felt as old as the city and, as he explored it deeper, he realised it was set down deep into the catacombs, pulling from the mountain’s heart. It was breathtaking.

“When you see the Star, light it,” said Sav.

And then he was gone, running as though the winds of winter were giving him the strength to carry on.

“So,” said Daine into the ocean of silence that remained, ripped apart by the wind as the sea was the waves. “Don will have a Gift again after all. Imagine if he knew it was Raven.”

Numair swallowed that. He didn’t want to talk about it anymore, as he felt all he’d done was speak of the implications. His only comfort was that he hadn’t heard from George since before he’d found it out, so George had never responded to his coded message informing him of the discovery.

“What’s happening?” Numair asked Daine, mostly to distract from that conversation but also because he was deathly curious.

“We’re on a mountain,” said Daine, unwrapping her hands from the rope to blow on her fingers. Numair, obligingly, warmed up the room – which he knew had probably just heated the entire estate, but they’d be thankful for it later. Daine looked pleased anyway, since she was barefoot. Who, Numair wondered, went barefoot to a _belltower?_ “Thanks. We get nasty winters up here, obviously. Snowed right in straight up until April or May, depending on how early the melts come. It’s why we’ve so many external doors on upper floors of our buildings, in case the lower ones are covered. It’s why we’re such a –” She gestured around the tower, which in the way of Gallan architecture was extremely ornate, painted where it wasn’t panelled and carved with minute details in all the oddest places. “– visual people, I guess? Our knights paint and sing and dance between for six months of the year it’s death to go too far outside your front door.”

Numair, who grew up in Carthak, thought that was the most hellish thing he’d ever been told. He shuddered, imagining snows that deadly. But Daine was craning around, looking out over the far window, and pointing. Numair followed her hand, looking down towards the Bog, which was impossible to see from here. Just inky black and swirling white.

“But we’re not isolated,” Daine said. Numair squinted.

And he saw it.

Glittering against the dark, he was watching great white lights spring up around the city. Only a handful, bold and bright. And other bells were singing now with great cries, joining the dark melody of the palace bells’ song.

“The bells summon the festival on the first proper snowfall of the season. We’re not supposed to ring ours until the Star is up, and we’re definitely not supposed to light our stars until they’ve something to aspire to.” Daine shrugged sadly. “But I suppose people are tired of being left in the dark. They don’t trust Don to light the city, even though he’s got the bells going, finally.”

“It sounds lovely,” said Numair. “But I don’t know why there’d be opposition to it? You still celebrate Beltane.”

“Winterlight is different,” explained Daine. “It’s the mage festival. Hundreds of years ago there was a killing winter under a cruel king. It swept down and covered all of Galla, killing so many. They said you could walk with your head above the snow only if you stood on the bodies of those who froze to death under it, but that in some parts of Cría that was easily done. And the mages rebelled against the king, who was using the winter to silence the angry people. They took to the streets with handfuls of fire and melted the snow, lighting the way to the palace, which they burned.” Her grin, when he saw it, was exquisitely gleeful. “We’ve burned the palace a few times. Don’s in, I think, the eleventh rebuild. He’s quite proud of that, even though Sav gets snarky sometimes and tells him Tortall burned it once and another time it just fell over. I think Maren got it once, too. Anyway, we light the stars in the morning instead of using mages with handfuls of fire, and then we go to the streets when the sun comes up and set up the lightways so people can find each other even in the worst of winter. After that, it’s mostly just fun and food, together for the last time before the freeze. We won’t see many others until spring – the staff will move in today, too, with their families. So it’s one of the busiest days of the year, with everyone checking on each other and barricading their houses, if they’re not spending winter there. Lots of us don’t. Even in the lower cities, most people spend winter with others, even if it means living with strangers. Alone, we freeze. You can probably see why they tried to stop it.”

Numair could, but he suspected he saw even more than Daine. She was so sensible, he knew that she was thinking of the basic celebration of revolutionary mages who’d saved the city from its king and how powerful it would be to stop the people commemorating that. But he thought of the bells that cried their songs even over the wind to tell the people they weren’t alone in the dark, and these lightways which he suspected allowed more movement in the dead of winter than there ever could be without it. He was thinking of a festival of community, of holding together; inspired by mages, continued by the descendants of those who couldn’t be frozen, of people who were strong together. And he could, indeed, see why insidious plots to weaken Galla would start first with the very thing that made them strong.

He turned.

He grinned.

“Daine,” he said, feeling her turn to look too, and her soft gasp of delight. Numair didn’t know how he felt about the potential for Sav’s return as the Gift, especially not after seeing the breathtaking melancholy of Don and Sav’s last kiss, and especially not after finding Raven, but he knew that right now, at this exact moment, as they looked to where the palace should be and saw the deep blue-white glow starting against the black sky … he knew that this, this was good.

“The Star,” breathed Daine, the glittering light reflected in her eyes.

They watched as the faltering light became a bright sunburst against the mountain, visible even through the snow. It was exactly like a star brought to earth, almost painful to look at until it settled back into a comfortable, cold glow. Awed, they watched in silence – and then Daine went still, eyes going huge. Numair didn’t need her to say it. Snow muffled sound, but the snow wasn’t heavy yet. Mostly, the city was damp, beginning to ice over. And sound still carried.

They stood in the belltower, listening to the cheers. Looking down as light swept over the city below, those with stars of their own rushing to light them and those without using oil lamps on long poles instead. Cría was awake, and they’d all seen their Star.

“Daine,” said Numair, shaking himself out of his wordless awe. “Daine, the bell!”

“Oh!” gasped Daine, laughing as she realised they’d completely forgotten. With that, she wrapped her hands in the rope and – he yelped, realising she should be wearing gloves to protect against the burn of the hemp – leapt up to put her whole weight on it, the bells clanging fit to deafen them both. But there was no time to wail about his poor abused ears or the state of Daine’s palms; Numair set his hands against the wall, found those pockets of magic, and used them to send a message: Hartholm was awake, Hartholm had seen, and Hartholm wouldn’t be isolated come this winter.

Sav came back almost as wild with excitement as he’d been on Beltane, re-enacting his mad dash to the palace to the glee of Daine and Constant, who’d returned with him. Constant, occasionally, would add his own flair, declaring that Sav had burst into the palace through the front doors like something from an epic ballad, while Sav cited that he’d used a side-door.

While Daine and Constant helped the staff move their belongings into the residences downstairs, Numair followed Savigny up to his rooms.

“I’m glad you’re still here for this,” Sav told him as they went. He was still smiling broadly, but it was shadowed now. The illusion was in place once more, Numair noted, though of course it was. Sav couldn’t have gone to the palace without it, not in front of Don and Constant. “You’ll love this. Don lighting the Star means we’re going to have a true Winterlight, fire of the Gods and all.”

Numair closed the bedroom door behind him.

Sav stopped talking, glancing at him curiously.

They’d talked since Raven, it was true, but this was the first time they’d been alone in the room together. Numair slept alone, in the guest room. Neither had approached the other, with no magical constructs of apology or stilted letters. They’d let themselves drift apart, both probably sensing the end looming and seeing no way through the thicket of Raven when there was no real promise of more anyway.

“You’re going to love Winterlight,” said Savigny quietly.

Numair went to him. He brought his hand to Savigny’s bearded jaw, feeling the shape of the scar below his thumb. Savs’ eyes darkened, briefly, but overall he simply looked longing.

“Let me see how it’s healed,” Numair murmured. Savigny ducked his head but did so, taking the illusions away until Numair could study the ragged line of scar tissue for himself. No facial hair grew around it, though Savigny had tried to cover the worst part, around the jaw, with it. “Does it hurt?”

“The cold burns it, yes,” Savigny said, Numair feeling the muscles working below his hands as the man spoke. “It twinges if I smile and pulls tight against my mouth. Ritsuko says it has months left of healing yet, if not years. I think what hurts the most is how you won’t look at me anymore.”

Numair flinched. “That’s not because of the scar,” he objected, feeling Savigny step back out of his grip. His hand dropped to his side and he watched glumly as Savigny walked away, getting his clothes ready to dress for the day. Splendid, as usual, he realised, seeing that whether or not Savigny had thought Winterlight was coming, he’d prepared for the hope of it in an outfit of deep winter blacks and frozen blues. Stars and snowflakes. Numair hurt.

“You don’t need to apologise,” was Sav’s bland response, holding his splendid outfit in his hands and gazing down at it. Running his fingers across the silks. “Ah, what’s the point? I can see it in your eyes. I’m as ugly and duplicitous on the outside as I’ve always been within now.”

And he tossed the clothes onto a dresser with a flick of his hand, the fine shirt slithering to the floor.

“I don’t hate you,” said Numair, staring at the puddled silk of the beautiful shirt. “I never could, I don’t think. And you’re not ugly.”

“It’s swollen and tight,” muttered Savigny, who’d turned his head away so Numair couldn’t look at him fully.

“It’s raw,” said Numair firmly. “It’s healing. Savigny, believe me – if you don’t think I’ve been lying down there _aching_ for you, you’re offensively wrong. For all my complicated feelings about Raven and your lies, I’d have come to your bed in a heartbeat had you invited me.”

“Not to stay, though,” said Sav.

Numair hesitated. But he wouldn’t meet lies with a lie.

“No,” he admitted. “Not to stay. But it has nothing to do with how attractive I find you, and please believe me when I say that that I don’t mean solely on the outside. I’ve a fierce love of sex. I crave touch with the thirst of a dying man. But sex is hollow for me if I’m not completely attracted to all of a person, the combination of the physical appeal and the emotional connection. Sav, I’m angry at you. I’m not disgusted at you. Unless you understand that, I don’t know how we move forward from here.”

“I know where I go,” said Savigny bitterly. He was undressing, revealing his lithe body without shame or discretion. Numair watched, mouth dry and with far more interest than he thought was wholly appropriate, considering the grim conversation. “You leave Galla back to your home and I, I vanish into Raven. I have nothing else to hold me here, once Constant is married off to the Silvain line and Daine realises she’s got bigger dreams than staying by the side of a man who was once important to her.”

“You’re her brother.”

“Not by blood,” said Sav. He was naked but furiously so, moving with jagged, frustrated grace. Flicking through his drawers and dressers, where there were far less clothes than Numair expected, though he knew it was because Savigny passed his clothes on to others rather than let them languish as he moved onto a next whim. He was a strange, lavish man who resented the wealth that allowed him his expensive delights, which Numair thought summed up quite well the conflicting chaos that defined him. “Ours isn’t a bond that will last a lifetime. It wouldn’t even has lasted this year, had it not been for you – you do understand how much joy you brought to us, how much change? Don’t you?”

Numair didn’t know what to say. Sometimes, words escaped him.

“I’m sorry for what I said,” he chose instead, walking across the room and taking up Savigny’s lovely clothes, that he’d rejected. Numair didn’t like seeing them on the ground. It made him feel too much like Sav really was going to slip away, into Raven and out of reach for good, if they didn’t tie him to himself. Numair knew Sav wanted to stay, he was _trying_ to stay; he hadn’t left the estate since the revelation, mostly to avoid being seen by Don but even once Don had found him – Numair knew he was avoiding returning to the lowest city, where no one knew what had happened to Raven since the king’s sword had struck her. “I accused you of terrible things because I was anxious about Ozorne and hurt by the idea you’d lied so well to me, about so many things. I’m not sorry for being hurt, or alarmed. I find it both hurtful and alarming and I’m right to do so, especially as even you admit you’re endangered by this foolishness.” He looked at Sav, holding the clothes, as Sav stared at the window, which was curtained so he was hardly looking at anything. Just not at Numair. “But I was wrong in the way I spoke to you, and Daine was right to tell me so. I’ve not lived your life, Sav. I cannot possibly pass judgement on the skills you and Daine utilised to survive. I think you should wear these, to your festival. After all …”

As he’d been talking, he’d been coming closer to Sav, until he stood before the man with the clothes in one hand. Leaning close, bringing his mouth to the uninjured side of Sav’s face and kissing the corner of his mouth.

“Daine told me it’s a celebration of mages,” he whispered against the warm skin he found there. “Sounds like you should go out there as yourself, to be celebrated. All those mages who light the city for their people.”

“Numair,” began Sav, but he turned his head to do so which brought their mouths together, and suddenly they were kissing with all the ferocity of those who knew it was a last time, or very nearly close. Though the first snows fell outside, spring loomed beyond that, and over it all was the shadow of Raven’s wings.

“Lock the door,” gasped Numair, pulling the other man to the bed with him to hide how panicked he was feeling about the end of something he loved.

Savigny did.

And for a while, they were quiet.

No one came looking for them, so they spend an hour in the comfort of each other’s arms. They’d need to wash before dressing now, unfortunately, but Numair considered it worth the fuss. Even through the melancholy context of the moment, he was glad they’d had it.

Savigny lay against the sheets, watching the ceiling. Not speaking. Numair on his side beside him.

“Tell me about Tortall,” Sav said suddenly.

Numair pondered that. There was so much to tell. In the end, he went with talking about his tower on the edge of the coast and how it looked across the ocean. He talked about the nearby town – Keel – and the people he knew there and was fond of. He talked of the Swoop, and of Alanna-the-person-not-just-the-Lioness. He spoke of the court and how lovely it was in the spring, the irritation of the rowdy pages, Sarge mocking him with his inability to ride.

He told Savigny all he missed, and more, in the short time he had for the telling.

Then he talked of his experiments, the books he’d left there to read, the life he’d left on hold. Savigny listened, not interrupting, and there was a devastating longing on his face that tore Numair down the middle. Sav’s wasn’t a life on hold; it was a life he hadn’t started, the only forward momentum occurring in the part of it where he wore another’s face.

“I live alone,” Numair finished with, hopelessly hopeful, “with so much space for another. I wish … we wouldn’t have to be lovers. I’d love you for a lifetime if you were my friend. I’ve a great need of more friends, no matter how many I find. I’m greedy.”

“Galla is my home,” whispered Sav.

Numair looked away.

“I’ve left you books if something happens to me,” was what Savigny broke the quiet with, which wasn’t at all what Numair had wanted. “Even though we’re no longer courting, I want you to know that will remain in place, no matter how long I live and if it’s been decades since we last spoke when it passes to you. I think it’s important that they go to someone so passionate. The only thing I ask is that you ensure the packet that comes with them – it contains letters – gets given to those who are alive to read them, please. I want you to take the packet with you when you leave, remove it from Galla. In case …”

He trailed off, but Numair understood. Sav was planning in case something went wrong. Numair, safe in Tortall, would be the holder of his words until such a time as the fires burned down and Numair could return, to see who’d survived, and who was in need of them.

“That’s horrendously morbid on what’s supposed to be a lovely day,” Numair grumbled, though he was also wondering if there was a letter to him in there.

Savigny shrugged. “Winterlight began with the death of thousands,” was his grim response. “Numair, is this it? Is there nothing left of us except my lies and what remains of this bed?”

Numair rolled over, catching him in his arms and holding him close, his face leaned against Savigny’s chest. “I don’t know,” he said, though he did. “We knew it wasn’t forever. It was still good though, even if it ended.”

“Maybe it’s good because it ended,” was Sav’s addition, and he smiled to temper it. Some of the sadness had vanished as Numair had held him, as though reminding them that, no matter what, they’d been kind to each other, they’d loved as best as they could, and they’d had fun. “I suppose, once Don’s little one has been taught to hold a sword, I could visit you in your empty tower with all that space.”

Numair grinned at him. That was what he liked to see; Savigny looking forward and planning for a future, even if it was uncertain.

“I’ll always have a place for you,” he promised.

There was a flash and they both sat upright, Numair feeling Sav’s heart gallop in his chest with surprise. The fire flashed, honey and smoke scenting the air.

Numair tensed.

Sav said nothing.

“Nonny knows you’re alive then,” Numair said, watching the flames return to their natural hue.

“Yes,” was Sav’s short response. He hesitated. He tightened his jaw, touching the scar. And then he slid out of the bed and reached for the clothes he’d abandoned, gathering them up and turning to Numair. “Come on. Let’s wash up. We’ve a festival to attend.”

“I can’t go,” Numair reminded him, frowning even though he was vivid with hope that Savigny wasn’t answering that dangerous call to return to the Bog, and the dangers that lurked there for him. “Ozorne or his people might see me.”

But Savigny just smiled.

Don prepared for Winterlight with his heart determined to see it through. Pacing through the words in his mind, though there were hours before they’d be spoken. Today was the beginning of the rest of his reign, he knew.

When he turned, Nora was there. Miel was quietly playing with toys that had appeared in Don and Nora’s suites for her one morning. Don smiled at Nora before glancing down at the flat plane of her abdomen, below the gown. He tried to look away as quickly as possible, but she still saw it, and smiled.

“Come here,” she said, taking his hand and pulling him close. Close enough to feel her warmth as she set his hand against her stomach and her own beside his, the two of them standing quiet and waiting for life. “Too early yet, Mama says, but I’m impatient. Aren’t you?”

“Very,” said Don longingly, wishing he could feel even a whisper of their child below his nervous palm. “I want to take food to the lower cities today, before the address. And lights, for those quarters without them. They won’t be thankful for it, and it will be risky. Will you stay with Miel?”

Nora rolled her eyes and said the expected, “No,” but Don had known it was coming. “I didn’t step into this role thinking it would be safe or soft, Biscuit. If there’s risk, we face it together. I can’t vanish until the little one is born, that’s not fair on those who look to me for hope.”

“I worry,” murmured Don.

Her expression softened, which continued to puzzle him. He’d thought she hated him; lately, it hadn’t felt like that. It had felt more like the cautious beginnings of a friendship, but he was scared to hope for that.

“We’ll double the guard,” she said. “They fight harder for me, anyway. And no one will attack those who brings food to strengthen their stores, especially as we’re taking from our own stores to do it. Carthak feeding our poor, who’d have thought it. We’re more thankful to him than I like.”

“No thanks needed,” came the smooth voice, Nora jumping so violently she almost lurched into Don, who turned to find Ozorne himself lounging by the door. “I must admit, I’m not used to weather like this. I simply can’t stop shivering.”

He smiled warmly, but he did look cold.

“I’ll go get dressed,” said Nora, giving Don a peck on his cheek before sweeping out, gown rustling. She only paused to give Ozorne a frightful smile, which he returned with one of his own.

“She’s a fierce one,” said Ozorne, stepping into the room and looking around curiously as Nora closed the door behind her. “What is today? Cole didn’t mention a festival.”

“It’s a winter celebration,” said Don stiffly, thinking of Numair. “In honour of mages who saved the city, many years ago.”

“Quaint,” said Ozorne. His circuit of the room had taken him around to Miel, and he crouched beside her and took the toy she was playing with from her. She blinked, startled, watching him examine it before shaking it vaguely in her direction. On a different man, this gesture would have seemed as though he was trying to play with her. With Ozorne, though, Don felt himself bristling. It was like a cat toying with a mouse to see what made the smaller beast twitch. “This little one, did you tell me where she came from? I forget.”

“She’s an orphan. I’ve taken her in, since she hasn’t anyone else.” Don watched Miel carefully, ready to swoop in the moment she looked upset at Ozorne’s attentions. He added, “Her name is Miel. It means honey.”

Ozorne held the toy out to Miel, who grabbed for it – and, right as her hands closed on the toy, he grabbed her wrist and there was a pulse of emerald green Gift and Miel jerked, wailing with fright as her hands glittered with a muted yellow glitter. Don lunged, grabbing her out of Ozorne’s grasp and whipping her away from him, rage dying on his lips as Ozorne grinned up at him. Slower, Ozorne stood, dusting himself off delicately.

“She’s Gifted,” Ozorne drawled as though nothing odd had happened. “Of course, it’s impossible to know just how strong someone this young is going to present as, but there’s a deep enough well of power there that I’d guess she’s going to be middling strong. Enough for the University to take her.”

Don was gazing at Miel, astounded at this revelation, before that sunk in.

“The what?” he asked dumbly.

“The University of Carthak,” said Ozorne. There was that smile again. Don tightened his grip. “Best school of magic in the world. You said she’s of no family with no money or birth. That’s no trouble, I can cover her tuition. Seeing you be so kind to a girl of no standing …” His eyes were boring into Don’s, who felt like backing away. “… it’s inspiring. Let me raise her higher than you ever could, in this country that still needs to heal before it can give its Gifted young the education they need.”

“She’s Gallan,” said Don, managing not to show the rage. He calmed himself by thinking of gentle things, like Miel’s grip on his shirt and Savigny walking in that morning to light the Star for them. “She belongs in Galla.”

“Yours is such a big heart,” said Ozorne softly. “You remind me of a friend I once had.”

Numair, thought Don, but that wasn’t right. Ozorne had made Numair out to be a maniac.

“That friend is dead now, though,” added Ozorne, shrugging as he stepped back.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” said Don, who could see now the lies laced on the words. He knew he’d never again put Miel down while Ozorne was close, some of Constant’s fear of the man catching on and snarling thick in his mind. “Will you come to the city with us? We’re distributing the gifts that Carthak was so kind to give us. You should be there, to see the splendour of Gallans at their best.”

There came a knock at the door, Cole entering. He moved slowly now, with the haggard limp of old bones exposed to cold. Don didn’t have it in him to feel sympathy, quashing down any hints of it before it could take hold.

Cole’s eyes slid from Ozorne to Don, to the unmade bed in the next room. There was unease in his eyes.

“Majesty,” he said, bowing as best he could. He should, technically, kneel, but as vengeful as Don felt, he couldn’t make a lame old man crouch on the flagstones. “I must advise again against this ride. It will alarm your people, if there’s another attempt on your life or the life of your queen or child.”

“A child?” Ozorne commented. Don glared at Cole, who looked distraught. “Congratulations, cousin. What a gift you bring your people, with your fine queen and her …” He looked, again, and Miel, and Don remembered how his cats would hiss and spit and lash for the eyes of anything that lurked too close to their kittens. “… little ones. Magisra, your king was just inviting me to see the splendour of his city during Winterlight. I shouldn’t think he’d be wanting us to bring the little one, if there’s the chance of danger. Will you take her?”

Claws, thought Don. Claws and teeth and rage. Miel began to whimper; he was holding her too tight.

“I’ll return her to the creche –” Don began, hating Cole with all of his heart. Thinking, again, of the bubbled flesh of Savigny’s arm, and him just a child.

“They’ve already taken the wards down to the little lake, sire,” said Cole. “Some servants remain, but I doubt many have time to spare for a child. I won’t be attending the festival. It displeases me, and I’ve no love of the chill. She can come see my hounds until you return, since I presume you’ll be wanting to take her to the lake after.”

“Wonderful,” said Ozorne before Don could, Don glancing at him and wondering the gall of a man who’d speak for a king in that king’s own palace. “I’ll prepare. What a lovely treat this will be.”

He left, Cole bowing to him too as he passed. And then they were alone.

“I really must voice my concerns about this,” said Cole as soon as he was certain Ozorne was truly gone.

Don relented, briefly thankful that he and his old mentor agreed on something.

“Yes,” he said with a frown. “I don’t trust him. Can you believe he asked to sponsor Miel at his university?”

Cole blinked. “She’s Gifted?” he said, giving her a look of deep distaste. “Then I really _must_ express myself. Not on Ozorne, Majesty, as he’s an ally you’re sore in need of. This child, this girl –”

“Miel,” said Don.

“Child,” said Cole, harder now. He tapped his cane impatiently. “What are you doing for her? Your obvious favouritism of her makes her a target. She draws attention away from the prospect of true heirs for you, muddying the waters. What if the child your wife carries goes still in the womb? Or, Mithros save us, something happens to the queen before she births it? You’ll be left with this orphaned Bog-child –”

“Miel,” said Don again, harder this time.

“– and a city full of nobles uneasy as to whether their king is going to sully his inheritance with common-born blood as well as his bed.”

Don inhaled. He exhaled. He tried to think of Miel, but then he just thought of the way Cole had said ‘Bog-child’, and he tried to think of Savigny but that way lay puckered skin and Savigny crying himself to sleep.

“You overstep,” said Don. His voice wasn’t his own anymore. He was channelling Savigny at his hoitiest, or perhaps Constant. Cole went to speak, but Don was sick of his voice. “In fact, I believe you’ve been overstepping for a long time, Cole Ombelinesri.” Cole winced, and Don added, perhaps spitefully, “Yes, I know your get-name, Magisra. Your birth is registered in the records, and I _read_ the records. Let he who isn’t bastard-born be the judge of other people’s worth, if anyone must be. And get out. I’m disgusted by you.”

“May I ask what I’ve done to anger you,” murmured Cole, who’d sunk down into himself as Don had snarled at him. Don battled fiercely against his horror at the man’s apparent weakness and his rage at what this man had done to those weaker than him. “You’ve been evading my consul for weeks now, Majesty. I am, as always, loyal to your reign. If I speak out of place, it’s only out of love.”

“I presume you burned Savigny for love too,” was Don’s spat retort, Cole recoiling with horror. “Oh yes, I know. I know of the fire opals too. Was the madness I sickened with after my mother yours too, you who consoled me against the danger of mage works? What does your God think of you using your Gift to harm others, seeing as I know he speaks against any use of magic?”

Cole said nothing. He’d gone a garish white. There would be no answers from there today.

“Get out,” said Don bitterly, turning his back on him. “The only reason I haven’t had you struck down for your crimes is that I’ve no proof and plenty who’d say it’s simply another attack on mages if I were to try. You’re protected by the appointment my mother gave you, but I promise that if I find a way to nullify your position, I will. Miel belongs here. You, you do not. Perhaps I shall send you to a border fief, and see what they make of you.”

Cole was silent. He didn’t grovel or apologise, he just stood in stark, astounded silence.

Finally, he managed, “Let me take the girl –”

Don whirled on him: “Would you _touch_ Miel I will have you struck down where you stand!” he roared, the door flying open as Rainary hurtled in at his shout, another guard peering through. Don, barely, controlled himself. “Captain, take two of your best people and escort Miel to the Hartholm Estate, please. Leave her in the care of Daine or Constant while I attend to my people and I will fetch her when I am done. And see another two men to escort Magisra Cole to his rooms, where they’ll stand guard outside his door. I would hate for something untoward to happen to him.”

No one, for a moment, said a word. The room was sick with the realisation that Don had just placed one of the most prestigious mages in the country under guard.

“And,” said Don heavily, “I trust that he won’t use his Gift to evade their careful eyes.”

“Majesty,” said Rainary, breathing hard. She gestured, two of her people scuttling in. One reached uncertainly to support Cole’s arm as he stumbled upright, but Cole snarled him away. Limping and rigid with rage, Cole turned on his heel and said nothing as he slunk out, the guards following. Once he could move again without shaking, Don crossed the room and passed Miel to Rainary, who took her gingerly. “That’s a powerful move, sire. It will have repercussions.”

“I know,” said Don, closing his eyes briefly before opening them and kissing Miel, tucking her toy into the crook of Rain’s arm. “See that Savigny and his companion are told that Miel is Gifted. I’ll want to know what they make of it. And Captain?”

Rainary paused, watching him attentively.

“Make sure they know that I fear there are plots against her,” said Don quietly. “I’m told Savigny is sending a hawk to Tortall somewhat soon. If circumstances force my hand, please ask them to consider how swiftly a burdened hawk can fly.”


	41. … and the Lighting of the Sky

The streets were busier than Numair had seen them in some time, people showing no inclination to get out of the weather while there was work to be done and festivities to be had. People shovelled snow out of the way of carts laden with belongings and great sheets of ice. Others were hanging strings of glass globes in lines down the streets, each line leading to a front door or a gate. Numair watched with fascination as mages, their cheeks marked with the red of a practising magic-user, tested the globes with their Gifts, making them spark a vast array of colours. There was a pattern to the string-lights, and Numair soon realised that this must be the lightways he’d been told about. If one was to walk below one, they’d soon find their way to a doorway, somewhere, if they were in dire straits.

“But what if the lights get buried?” he asked Savigny, who was using his Gift to help test the globes. Numair, hidden in an illusioned vest of Savigny’s that had made Daine laugh herself sick when she’d seen him in, was forced to rely on offering solely his height; Ozorne would know his Gift, if he saw it in use.

Daine bounced with excitement, Constant grinning alongside her. “Come see!” said Constant, leading the way. Numair followed, right behind the happily panting Earnest, who had been rigged to a small sled covered in glass baubles which jingled happily as he went. He was prancing just to make the baubles sound, delighting every child who saw him and clapped along with his congratulatory sled dance. Miel, who had the place of pride riding in the little cart, looked about as impressive as a queen as she rode about in glory.

“See!” said Daine, pointing. Numair was astounded. The carts of flat ice he’d seen, here they converged. Mages had converged too, gathering with burly men and women to lift the sheets of ice and work to mould them into tunnels, sealed along the seams. The tunnels were tall enough for the average Gallan to walk through, though Numair would have to stoop; as he watched, they began to spiral out, building them further through the Jewel.

“Winterlight is the last night you can use carts in the city on any of the streets with the snow tunnels,” explained Constant. “They’re mage-worked to stop them collapsing on people, and to keep the air fresh, but they still can’t handle being jostled by horses. Until the deep snow comes and buries them, people have to be careful of them.”

“What if we get a melt?” Numair asked, examining the sheet of ice and wondering where they’d gotten it.

“We won’t,” said Constant with a grin. “Our winters aren’t so kind. Besides, they’re too thick to melt fast, and the mages keep an eye on them. Once the streets fill with snow, they’re the only way to get around that isn’t across the roofs.”

“Constant, of course,” began Daine, “climbs across the roofs.”

“It’s so much fun,” was Constant’s dreamy response. “Except that one time I slipped and fell into the snow and couldn’t figure out what way was up. Daine got me out, by my _ankle_.”

Numair looked at Daine, who sighed. As Constant and Earnest bounded off to help with the tunnels – Numair heard Miel going _wheeee_ as off she went with them – she was following, lecturing: “You don’t pull someone out of a drift by their ankle, Constant. You’ve got to dig them out first, or they’ll suffocate.”

Constant didn’t appear to be listening. 

Numair leaned against the wall, taking a breather to examine the scene. His nose was alive with the smell of frying fat, great vats set up periodically along the streets as the houses sent their kitchen staff out to feed the workers. The vats were hung over fires that were carefully kept away from being able to radiate heat onto the ice tunnels, and people took it in turns to dip their food of choice into the bubbling contents, emerging with it crispy and hot. Numair’s mouth watered. He hadn’t had breakfast.

Bon Bon, who’d stayed with him – evidently, she didn’t mind that his face was different – was also watching the vats with a hungry expression.

“Shall we?” asked Numair, jingling the coins in his pocket even though he hadn’t seen money pass hands. Bon Bon seemed to get the idea anyway. Her tail began to wag slowly. “Where’s Savigny? He hasn’t eaten either, the skinny git. He’ll waste away.”

But a cursory glance at the street didn’t reveal him.

Numair shrugged and decided to feed him later.

Hands filled with hot meat, of which he blew on to cool for the saddest freckle hound in the world who leaned on his knee gazing at him woefully, Numair found a somewhat unsnowed upon seat to eat his meal. His attention was wholly on his food.

“Begging your pardon, good sir,” came a soft voice behind him, Numair startling before he realised it was a beggar inching out of the gap between two buildings, shadowed in the darkness. “Can you spare some coin for a hungry birdie?”

“It’s hot,” said Numair, turning as he went to pass some back. He could get more. “They’re not charging today, friend. You can eat your fill so long as you offer to hang some lights.”

“Ah, but then I wouldn’t have the opportunity to talk to such a man as yourself,” grinned the beggar. That grin, Numair noticed with a frown, was very familiar. “You’re a striking sight, as tall as you are. If only my fair missus could see you now.”

And he stepped out of the darkness and into the light.

Numair almost dropped the meat. He lurched up, shocked, before managing to catch himself and sit back down, feigning surprise at the man’s sudden appearance.

“Excellent acting,” said George, coming to take a seat beside Numair. Bon Bon made room begrudgingly. “Brought a tear to my sweet eyes. Well, come on. Share. I’ve been riding hard and I’ve an appetite that’d kill a lesser man.”

“How?” was all Numair managed, overcome with the desire to just sit there and drink in the sight of his friend, here in the flesh. Dressed down – though not as beggarly as Numair had first thought, when seeing him hunched in the dark – and with a beard he wore more comfortably than Savigny did his helping obscure the details of his face. True as he’d said, he grabbed the meat Numair offered and tore into it, thinner than Numair remembered too. Numair set the rest upon the paper and gave it to him in the face of that hunger, ignoring Bon Bon’s heartbroken whine.

“I’ve ways of getting many places fast,” George answered. “That’s all you need to know right now. Ozorne?”

“With the king,” said Numair, realising. “Wait, how did you recognise me? I’ve an illusion still on, don’t I?”

“Don’t fret, it’s still on. It’s good too. I’ve the Sight, lad. I’ve been seeing through better illusions since you were still learning to juggle in Carthak. Which ones are your companions then?”

Numair looked around the square as George ate, finally spotting Daine and Constant. “Them,” he said softly.

George peered, though mostly at Daine, who glanced over. “Oh, she’s a pretty one,” he said. “Raoul was right. You devastated him, you know. He had money on it being the woman you were getting cosy with, then you go and foil him with the marquis.”

Numair was outraged at the idea that they’d placed _bets_ on his love life. Though, the outrage fading quickly, as he was very intrigued.

“Who did you have money on?” he asked, realising shortly after that the question he should have asked was ‘how did you know I was being ‘cosy’ with anyone?’ It appeared he’d gained a reputation.

“I didn’t,” George said, grinning in his usual fashion, a smile set to soothe homesick hearts. “I’m smarter than that. The lady would have had me up by my crooked nose had she thought I was encouraging such laddishness.”

Numair grinned. “Ah,” he murmured, “so you won, then.”

“Yours is a heart that dreams big, Numair,” was George’s pleased response. “And you’ve got style. I knew you’d dazzle the brightest button in the room. Oh, here she comes.”

They watched Daine approach, though she kept being waylaid by well-wishers. Miel remained with Constant, Numair noting the palace guards who lounged within shouting distance of them as though they’d just happened to land there.

“How much does she know?” asked George.

Numair thought about Daine, as best as he knew her. He felt that was well enough by now.

“She knows all of me,” he said loyally. “But she’s sister-in-heart to the king and the marquis, if you’ve words that might hurt them. Other than that, I’d speak frank in front of her. It won’t go further.”

George nodded, busying himself with his food.

“You’ve made a friend then,” said Daine, coming up in front of them. Her eyes lingered on the food and she asked, “I hope you ate too, Numair. You’d stand naked in the snow just to make sure someone else is warm, I swear.”

George snorted, though he glanced to Numair’s empty hands. “I’m afraid I’ve eaten his lunch,” he said, grinning ruefully. The charm worked on Daine, as it did on everyone; she flushed a delightful pink. “Allow me to finish this and I’ll get us some more. Daine, isn’t it?”

Daine’s smile vanished, her gaze ticking from Numair to George nervously.

“Daine, this is George,” explained Numair after a nod from George. “He’s a friend from Tortall.”

“And he’s like you?” asked Daine, lowering her voice.

Numair hesitated before offering, “He’s no scholar,” in a careful voice.

It seemed to be enough. Daine set back on her heels and eyed George thoughtfully.

“So what’s a not-scholar from Tortall doing here on the brink of the freeze?” she asked. “Have you come to steal him home?”

Numair’s heart twinged for a moment at the thought, but he doubted George would have ridden hard to get here, away from his wife and children, on a fetch mission to escort Numair home. Numair wasn’t that important.

“I wish,” was George’s serious answer, all the humour vanishing. “I’m on a mission of my own, I’m afraid. It fortunately brought me in the vicinity of Numair.”

“For your king?” was Daine’s follow-up answer.

George hesitated just a moment too long, Numair suddenly feeling alarmed about that pause. “He’ll be pleased with the results,” was the evasive answer, which Numair realised was George saying he was here without permission or leave. That may have been, Numair realised, the most frightening thing he’d ever heard George say around him. “Do you recall when I asked you of the location of another Jewel, much like the one our friend has possession of?”

That question had been aimed at Numair.

“Yes,” said Numair cautiously, who’d found nothing on it no matter where he’d looked. He’d asked Savigny to search too, on his journeys, though as it turned out Savigny hadn’t been journeying as far as expected either, it was no wonder they’d never found anything.

“Well, we’ve nosed up more on it,” George said grimly. “Alanna’s in Carthak.”

Numair shuddered with horror. “Alone?” he breathed, feeling rigid from his toes all up his spine to his panicking brain. “I should have gone with her! She doesn’t know the customs!”

“Sarge does though,” George said.

Numair went silent; not just in his voice, which felt like he’d forgotten how to use it, but in his mind too. The horror was too great.

All he managed was a quiet, “No.”

“I’m not best pleased either,” said George, washing his hands with a grimace in a pile of snow, which Bon Bon promptly began licking. Absentmindedly, he patted her as he talked. “I rowed with his Majesty over it. Gave the queen a bit of a fright, I’m afraid, and Myles. They’ve never seen me so fit to feud. Tensions are high. Anyway, I had a thought that if the second Jewel was in Carthak, Ozorne would have found it by now and we’d all be slaves already. Seeing as there’s no collar on our necks, I figure he hasn’t.”

“The desert is huge, George,” Numair pointed out.

“Aye, it is,” said George quietly. “But the mountains, they’re meaner. The desert just kills you with heat. These mountains, they’ve got boogeys that no gods or mages ever sent to other realms. And Ozorne is here, isn’t he? Not back digging in his sand. Have you looked at a map of Galla recently? Noticed how much the shape of the place has worked for its people? Those mountains that cup it kindly around the back, stopping invasive forces from nastier minded countries, the flat plains sheltered from the worst winters that have rich volcanic soils despite no mountain ever blowing its top here in written record. Funny place, isn’t it?”

“Didn’t an elemental make the Jewel?” Numair asked. “I can’t see why he’d have made –”

“You wrote me a letter about your catacombs,” George interrupted, hazel eyes intent. “What did you say about them?”

Numair shrugged; it had been a while ago. He could have hazarded a guess, but he didn’t remember his exact words, and he suspected exact wording was what George was after.

“That’s what I thought,” said George with a nod. “You wrote those letters shortly after coming up, but you don’t remember now, do you? Daine, do you remember anything of being down there?”

“No,” said Daine quietly. “Just that it was hard to breathe and I thought Sav was dying.”

Numair shuddered.

“You said, and these are exact, mind you,” began George with a shadow of a grin, “‘The catacombs are spooky and there’s something down there’.”

There was a lull. Daine snorted, breaking it.

“Oh, that’s poetry,” she sniggered into her sleeve, trying to hide the undignified sound.

But Numair was distracted from his bad prose by a flicker of a memory, something inhuman looming over him. Something that had spoken to him.

“Something else held the walls,” he realised out loud, cold clutching his stomach. The other two looked at him, Daine’s glee fading. “Don, the king, he got … sick. Partway down. He started acting very oddly, and Savigny was, he was so insensate when we got to you. He couldn’t have still been holding the walls. I assumed he was because you weren’t dead, but he wasn’t, was he? Something else did. Whatever else was there.”

“Numair’s spooky thing,” said George with a stern nod that Numair glared at him for. “Look, I don’t know what that thing is or if I’m even right, but I’ve got a good feeling for this. Jon’s wrong. It’s _not_ in Carthak.”

Numair looked at him. He could hear what George wasn’t saying, even if Daine couldn’t; if George truly had gone rogue, leaving Tortall without Jon’s permission or knowledge, then George needed this jewel to be here.

“Don’t go into the catacombs alone,” said Numair quietly to his friend, George glancing to him. “They’re dangerous, and you’ll need at least me. Me and Savigny, if you’ll allow him. It took both of us to get through last time.”

George considered that for a moment before nodding. “But I’ve a fierce need to sleep right now,” he said, briefly closing his eyes and leaning back against the wall behind them. “I’m exhausted and I’ve still got to find my way around this cursed place to find lodgings.”

Numair opened his mouth but Daine got in first.

“You might as well stay with us,” she said, crossing her arms. “You’re beat. I wouldn’t let a horse in your condition leave its stable, especially not to go stumbling around a city they don’t know. Numair, tell him.”

George looked at Numair.

“She’s right,” said Numair. “It’s a big enough place, and the staff are circumspect. They have to be, working for Savigny. And he’s put up with me, I don’t think he’ll mind you.”

“Don’t matter if he does,” said Daine stubbornly. “It’s my house too.”

“And the lady does speak,” George said with a tired smile. “Alright, I’ll kip in with you, Numair. For now, anyway. I’ve a suspicion I’ll be poking around your Rogue’s house soon enough, which might mean slipping away. Don’t fret if I do. I’m a big lad, very independent. I can feed myself and everything.”

Numair laughed softly, standing. He was _still_ hungry.

“I’ll take you back to the estate,” he said, contemplating checking in on the kitchens while they were there.

But George was shaking his head, also standing and stretching with a groan. “I’m here, aren’t I?” he said, looking around. “And it looks to be an auspicious day. I’d like to have a nosy on it all, get a feel for the place. If you don’t mind an old brigand like me tagging along.”

“Never,” Numair told him fondly. Then he looked to Daine. “Go get Constant. We should feed him and Miel before – what did you say we were doing after the lightways?”

Daine just grinned.

Savigny reappeared a few hours later with a box, which he placed upon Earnest’s sledge behind Miel. After a cursory introduction to George – which Numair knew did nothing to assuage Savigny’s obvious curiosity – they began to travel uphill, past the palace and into the gated woodlands that were normally closed to commoners, kept purely for the royal court’s hunting pleasure. The royal court being Don, that meant the most pleasure they got from it was bird watching, of which Constant was rapturous about. He’d glommed onto George for some reason and had, the entire walk up, been raving excitedly about every bird he saw, the stream of people around them giving them a wide berth in case he tried to include them in his itinerary of winged things. George, who was very polite, listened and occasionally made positive comments, though Numair suspected his brain had long ago glazed over. It was stopping Numair from pestering him with questions about Alanna and Sarge and George’s risk in coming here though, which he supposed was a positive.

And then they rounded a bend in the woods and saw what was ahead. Daine kept shooting gleeful glances at Numair, which should have been a clue.

“Oh no,” said Numair.

“Woooow,” gasped Miel, Earnest responding to her excitement by almost launching her out of the sledge by leaping into the air. Constant, fortunately, for all his excitement knew his dog. He caught them both, Daine proceeding to lecture Earnest on appropriate ways to bounce when in charge of a toddler.

Miel, who loved being bounced, clapped for more.

Numair was too busy staring at the lake, which had been decorated with nets covered in sparkling lights, with coloured flags and ribbons bedecked everywhere. The lake itself was a perfectly flat expanse of ice, mages with their red-tinged cheeks skating across it, their Gifts being used to check every inch of the ice to, Numair assumed, make sure it was sound. There were more stalls of food here, crowds of excited revellers, and several carts loaded with skates for sale. Numair had never ice skated. The prospect of strapping knives to his feet and flirting with an icy, watery doom had never appealed.

He turned beseeching eyes upon Daine, who looked so giddy with excitement he knew she was hoping to get him out there.

“I don’t skate,” Numair said flatly.

“I do,” said Savigny, cutting their brewing disagreement off at the knees. “I don’t care what _you_ do. Hurry up! Earnest, yip.”

Earnest yipped alright, going from a standing stop with his ears flat as he woefulled about being told off to a sprint without an in-between speed, Miel shrieking with excitement. Since Savigny was running with them with no fear of turning his ankle in the snow, apparently, neither Constant or Daine bothered to yell the hound back. They just hurried after, slightly more stately but only just. Bon Bon gave Numair a long-suffering look and trotted after Constant, lifting her booted paws high over the snow with the pernickety demeanour of a cat.

George and Numair ambled up at the rear.

“The child, whose is she?” asked George as they went.

Numair lowered his voice: “No one’s. A ward of the palace, a favourite of the king’s.” He frowned, thinking of Rainary’s cryptic message when she’d delivered the girl to them. “Donatien has concerns for her safety. And he knows about my hawk – he sent a message requesting I consider how fast a burdened hawk can flee, insinuating plots against her.”

“Against an orphan ward? I can’t imagine who’d benefit from such an invisible target.”

Numair thought of Don and how he looked at the girl, right from the moment she’d first crawled up to him on the dirty floor of the Dark Rose.

“Cruelty is its own benefit, for some,” he said, thinking of Ozorne. “And the king loves her. That’s reason enough.”

George hummed, watching Constant lift Miel from the sledge and prop her on his hip as Savigny unpacked the box. The box, of course, contained skates, much to Numair’s unease. But most of all, Numair was struck by the unhappy look on George’s face as he watched the girl up until he realised that by leaving Tortall against the king’s orders, George had also left his young children behind with no guarantee of seeing them again, especially if Alanna took against him for his flight, especially because George had done it in the name of protecting her. She wouldn’t like that at all.

Numair had no idea how to even begin talking to him about that. He just touched a hand to George’s elbow in what he hoped was a comforting manner, earning a soft smile from his friend in return.

“Numair!” called Daine. This earned her a glare, Numair planting his feet and giving her his best ‘no’ stare.

“Leave him,” Savigny said. He followed up with a quiet word that Daine grimaced at, but she didn’t call Numair’s name again. “He’ll join if he wants.”

Numair was thankful for Savigny, who winked at him before he crouched to put on his own skates. People were beginning to filter onto the lake now, many of them keeping well clear of the few mages still on the ice. Numair grieved that. For all that Don had brought Winterlight back, the aftershocks of the beginning of his reign still lingered. Distrust was so easy to sow and so difficult to dispel.

Then all thoughts of danger to Miel and Sarge and Alanna were swept from his mind as Daine and Savigny took to the ice too. Numair had expected Savigny to be fast and graceful, of course, as he was on land and it seemed unlikely he’d lose that on the ice. But Daine, Numair for some reason hadn’t thought for a minute that Daine would be able to match him as she was. And _how_ she was, Numair’s mouth dropping open as the two went from finding their feet on the ice to racing so swiftly and smoothly into the empty expanse of the middle of the lake that he almost lost them. They moved in unison, not just side by side but also playfully skating around each other without ever missing a stroke, as though they were dancing out there on the ice. Numair could hear them both laughing from here, his heart thrilled with the realisation that this was a joy they’d obviously shared so many times to be so good at it.

“Show offs,” he heard Constant say to Miel with a sigh. He had his own skates on and was wobbling his way onto the ice, though Numair suspected his wobbling was because he’d set Miel’s little feet on top of his own feet and was taking tiny steps to compensate, holding her hands in his to balance her. It certainly seemed that he knew his feet once he was on the ice, drifting slowly and softly goading Miel to, “Skate! Skate!”

Miel, for her part, was cackling as though this was all her, leaping up and down and making Constant have to keep readjusting himself to keep her atop his feet. They didn’t move far from the edge, with Earnest jingling his way along the shore staring at Miel with his fuzzy white face set in an anxious frown. Occasionally, he’d make a soft, “Rowf,” sound at her, which Constant ignored. Eventually, Bon Bon minced her way over to him and licked his face, which seemed to be a sign for him to sink down onto his haunches and be quiet, though he still watched Miel worriedly.

Numair and George didn’t speak. They found a spot to spectate the skaters, George dozing lightly as Numair pondered his own thoughts. He was distracted, though, by watching Daine and Savigny, who were an arresting pair out there on the ice taking it in turns to chase each other, often after swooping close to the shoreline to grab handfuls of snow to toss at the other’s head.

“Hello,” murmured George suddenly, lifting his head. “Is that His Majesty?”

Numair glanced over, seeing a small procession of guards approaching, Don at the helm. Nora walked beside him, with Rain at her side, and they all three were looking out over the ice. “Yeah,” he went to say, but his voice froze in this throat.

Ozorne walked with them.

Ozorne, the same as he’d always been but older too. Numair was immediately assaulted by memories of the sight of him, the scent, the feeling of his hands; Varice’s cooking and Ozorne’s laugh and the tip of the sword touching Numair’s throat right on the pulse and the gurgles of a dying lover. The stink of blood on sand, bare feet burning, fear and hunger and lover and running and running and running –

“Steady,” came the calming voice, Numair turning towards it as a sunflower did the sun, desperately seeking sanity. George was there, his expressive face, his worried mouth, his soft eyes. George of the Swoop, of Tortall; George was a sign that Numair wasn’t on that road anymore, he wasn’t at Ozorne’s mercy. He was well away from the bloodied sands. “I knew we shouldn’t have left you here near him.”

Numair took a deep breath and scanned the ice, letting his gaze fall on Constant, who’d battled his own demons and come out the other side. Battleshock hadn’t stopped him going to the palace or doing his duty. He’d learned ways to cope, as had Don against the ways his mind turned against him. So to, Numair determined, would he.

“I’m steady,” he said, calming himself with the same breaths he’d taught Constant and Don. On the bank of that steadiness, he softly filled George in on all he needed to know about the new arrivals, about Nora and Donatien and even Rainary. George listened, consuming it all silently and doing with the information as he needed.

By the time Numair was done, the group had splintered; Nora and Rain, with their guards, had come near where George and Numair sat. Neither recognised Numair under his illusion and so didn’t approach him, though Numair was close enough to hear them speak to each other. Don and Ozorne had walked to the edge of the lake, where Don was putting on skates and Ozorne was shaking his head. Numair grinned without humour; much like Numair, Ozorne saw no appeal in ice skating. He didn’t like being reminded of the things they’d shared.

Then Don took to the ice.

Numair watched, half distracted by Ozorne’s proximity, as Don swept across the ice to Constant, scooping Miel from Constant’s feet. Miel, for her part, saw Don coming and leapt in Constant’s grip, twisting a hand free to reach for Don. Numair hoped Ozorne hadn’t seen that, but glancing at the man, he saw that he was watching Don as the hawk watched the mouse. It made Numair’s heart race and his mouth dry; he tasted copper in the back of his throat. And then Don whirled out with Miel in his arms, drifting lazily into the stream of skaters, who poured around him as neatly as a river around a rock. Numair heard the cry go up – it sounded like ‘small guard’ – and then the stream of skaters reformed, people scattering and coming back together in an organised vanguard around their king not, Numair realised, because he was their king, but because of the child in his arms. They circled him as an impassable wall against clumsy passers-by, stopping an unwary skater from knocking into the man holding the girl. Now Numair had noticed, he saw that there were similar pockets all over the ice, strings of skaters holding hands as they circled fathers and mothers and siblings holding their small companions and even, in some places, around children old enough to be wearing their own skates but young enough to be injured if they were knocked down.

“They’re so aware of each other,” said George, his voice bordering awed. “Look at that – they’re strangers and they just see each other. I’ve not seen that in some time.”

Numair thought of everything he’d seen today, and then he looked up at the gloomy sky overhead and, distantly, the dull glow of the burning Star.

“They have to,” he said, feeling warm and content in the knowledge of the day. “When everywhere is winter, all they’ve got is each other.”

George glanced oddly at him, but Numair ignored him. He was busy living in the moment, pushing all the fears that assailed him away.

But the crowd around Don had been forced to break away as Sav and Daine darted up, laughing as they each caught an arm of the king and spun him, Don’s yell audible even from here. They were relentless though, Don forced to dart forward to try to escape, as hopeless as it was to try. They were like wolves on a hare, nipping at his heels. He couldn’t help but laugh too, until Savigny swept in, said something Numair couldn’t hear, and – as Don yelped in alarm – stole Miel from Don’s arms. Don tried to chase Savigny as he swept away with several great strides of his skates, but Daine stopped him – and then Savigny was off, whirling off with dizzying speed, the girl clinging to him like a monkey. He wasn’t cautious or careful, not like Don had been, as steady on skates as he was on his feet, spinning and leaping with the girl, who was screaming with absolutely giddying excitement. Don, however, appeared to be having a meltdown while Nora was up and, from her expression, torn between delight and horror.

“He’s in for boxed ears when that mot’s da gets hold of him,” George commented, eyes glittering.

“He’s not –” Numair went to say, then stopped. George knew. Numair had told him, after all. And really, if anyone was to recognise someone melting down over their child doing something dangerous, it was George; he was, after all, parenting Aly. “I don’t think Sav will ever let him catch him.”

That was wrong. Don managed to escape Daine and was off, just as quick when not burdened with the girl as Sav and Daine had been. It didn’t take him long to catch Savigny, though not to box his ears, as it turned out. Instead, he swung up beside Sav and reached out, setting his hands on Sav’s elbows.

They slowed, speaking together. Drifting gently, Miel still cackling in Sav’s arms.

Then, idling towards the edge of the ice where it was quieter, Don took one of Miel’s hands, Sav the other. With their free hands, they held each other. And they hung her gently between them, letting her boots skate across the smooth ice as they drifted in lazy, lackadaisical circles, their attention both fixed on Miel’s balance as she worked to find her feet on the strange surface.

Numair watched them together until it hurt too much to keep doing so, tearing his attention away from them – they seemed to be existing in a pocket of reality where it was just them and the girl, no one else – and looked to Nora, who was watching Don thoughtfully. That hurt too, so Numair looked for Daine.

And he found her.

She was skating by herself, eyes narrowed dangerously. Constant was near her, though he was looking up at the sky. Likely looking for birds. Numair followed Daine’s eyeline, and he got a terrible shock.

Ozorne was standing beside the lake, and he was looking directly at Numair. His gaze set firmly on him and his expression bare. Numair couldn’t tell if he was staring at him because he recognised him, or if something about him had caught the other man’s attention, but there was no denying that he was the focus of that sharp stare. It was horrifying; it was like having his flesh peeled from his body; it was like being in that cell again. He recoiled, George hearing his inhale and looking around. He too saw the way Ozorne was staring and cussed softly under his breath.

“Don’t panic,” murmured George, too softly to be overheard. “There’s no guarantee he’s made you. He’s got no Sight.”

Numair wasn’t so certain. His brain was concocting increasingly terrible outcomes. And he wished Ozorne would just look away –

Daine slashed in out of nowhere, skidding to a violent stop on the ice so close to the edge of the lake that she caught a wave of fresh snow on the blades, the ice and snow catching Ozorne clean in the side of his face. He stumbled back with a yell, trying to wipe his eyes clear – but she was already gone, yelling back, ‘Sorry!’ in a voice that was barely not laughing. Numair, seeing the anger on Ozorne’s face, almost threw up with panic; he’d seen Ozorne whip a man raw for less insult than Daine had just showed him, mud and ice dripping down his coldly handsome face.

There.

Numair saw it happening in slow motion, the glitter of emerald green across the ice, right across the expanse where Daine was speeding. It coiled like a rope, ready to lash across her ankles and send her flying with bone-shattering force. He lurched up, ready to belay it with his own Gift –

Sav darted out of nowhere, straight through the deadly coil of Gift. Numair’s cry died on his lips; the green Gift snapped around Sav’s skates and simply vanished, Sav not missing a beat. But, in the corner of Numair’s eye, he saw the recoil of it lashing, snapping his head around and seeing Ozorne massaging his hand, his mouth blank but his eyes enraged. He was, Numair realised, watching Savigny – and as Numair looked to Sav, he saw with another burst of nausea that Sav was looking straight back, eyes locked with Ozorne. A challenge and a threat in them. He wanted Ozorne to know he’d seen that; he wanted him to know he’d undone it without a thought.

“Mithros,” breathed George. “What’s he doing? Is he mad?”

But Numair couldn’t answer; he was too fixated on Ozorne’s response. Sick with anxiety, he stared at the two men as they faced off like cats about to fight, Ozorne’s face so perilously blank and Savigny’s lazy with insolence.

Ozorne smiled and bowed, turning his back and leaving without another word. Sav didn’t even glance to Numair. He just watched Ozorne go and then he went back to where Don was standing with Miel, his own expression anxious. They spoke together quietly, quickly. Daine ignored Don calling out to her. And then Sav shook his head and took Miel up, resting her gently on Don’s shoulders – Nora commented sharply on that – before taking her hands in his to compensate for the lost balance of the action and leading Don in tedious circles, face-to-face with each other. It hid their mouths from others, the two men leaning close and talking rapidly, while still letting Miel look over the ice like the queen of the lake.

“Someone else is watching them,” said George suddenly. “Over there.”

Numair looked where George had nodded, but he couldn’t see anyone in the mottled patch of bush and leafless tree. That didn’t, however, mean no one was there.

“Illusioned?” he asked.

George nodded. “Can’t see much of them,” he commented. “Just their Gift flickering. It’s odd. It’s like bits and pieces of a whole Gift.”

Numair shuddered. He knew.

“Nonny,” he hissed, George’s eyes narrowing. “What are they doing?”

For a moment, George didn’t answer. And, when he did, it was with nothing surprising, and nothing comforting.

“Just watching Savigny,” he said.

That, Numair thought, was exactly what he was afraid of.

Constant was exhausted by dusk, though not as exhausted as Numair and his friend looked even through the odd illusion Numair was wearing. Constant hadn’t asked about the illusions, recognising that Numair was likely hiding from Ozorne. That was understandable, Constant figured. He wished he could hide from Ozorne too. And Cole. The palace was increasingly filling with people Constant wished he could hide from. Often, these days, Constant was thinking more and more longingly of his old bedroom at the Hartholm estate, with Numair and Sav tinkering in the study and Daine in the stables or working with her herbs. But he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t leave Don, not now, not when they’d come so far.

Don, right now, was arguing with Cole.

“You can’t do it!” Cole was exclaiming. They were in the anteroom that led out to the balcony where the king traditionally gave his addresses to the people, who were gathering in anticipation of whether, tonight, Don would give them the Winterlight they desperately needed. “It’s sacrilege! Yahzed will see it as a rejection of him –”

“Good!” was Don’s snapped response. “I’ve a duty to all gods, if you haven’t forgotten, not just your fiendish deity.”

Cole blanched.

“You speak blasphemy,” he murmured, looking away as though he could barely stand it. “He lights this land that your pagan deities have abandoned. Have the temple priests not told you of how Weiryn’s shrines wither and fail, how the Mother’s statues tarnish? There are no gods left in Galla but Yahzed, who protects us. You will incite _chaos_ upon us if you have the criminal mages who flaunt the treasonous gods’ magic by incinerating the sky.”

The room was so loud despite the fact no one spoke for a moment. Constant saw guards desperately staring straight ahead, expressions fixed as they pretended they weren’t listening. Nora was rigid by the door, clearly fighting a losing battle to hold her tongue. Constant himself was enraged by the concept of Weiryn abandoned them, his _people_. They were Weiryn’s when all the other gods ignored them, considering them too wild to concern themselves with as the lower nations sought golds and jewels to tempt them with. Weiryn didn’t care for riches; he loved them because they were his as the forests and the lakes and the mountains were his; the forests his lungs, the mists his breath, the earth his tempestuous heart of which they were born upon and would return to as ash that settled lightly upon it.

Don looked at Nora, not at Cole. His shoulders were straight. His expression was firm. And every eye in the room was upon him, even Ozorne’s, even Cole’s, though Cole was trying to hide it.

“Does anybody else wish to air their concerns?” he asked the room at large. There were nobles, courtiers, staff. There was the huddled group of shellshocked mages, who’d been pariahs mere months before and now had been summoned by their king to set the sky on fire, as the mages all those centuries ago had Cría itself. “I’m listening.”

No one spoke.

“Then,” was Don’s cool response to that silence, “I’m going to walk with my queen to stand before my people, who have been denied the freedom they were born deserving. The mages I have asked here tonight as my guests will accompany us. Magisra, you embarrass yourself. Be quiet and do your duty as you demand I do mine, or go back to your chambers where I should have left you.”

Constant winced. That wasn’t political; perhaps Don was never going to come out of this without making a deep enemy of Cole, if he wasn’t already one. But he should have at least made the enmity less blatant. Less public.

“Your address, Majesty,” was the only voice that spoke, one of Don’s secretaries tiptoeing forward with a slip of parchment.

Don barely glanced at it. “I don’t need that,” he said, stepping forward and taking Nora’s hand without once looking back at where Cole was shaking with rage. “I’ve used other people’s words for too long tonight. It’s time the people of Galla heard my voice.”

And he gestured for the doors to open, revealing the inky black sky overhead. The slow dusting of snow that still fell as the temperature dropped, the gust of icy air that lashed in. On the other side of those doors, Savigny already stood, looking out over the crowd that was gathering in shocking silence. The Winterlight address was not as traditional as Beltane. It rarely drew a crowd. After all, the final moment of the day – the lighting of the sky – was visible all over the city, and it was always icy by dusk. People preferred to be home, huddled on their own balconies and looking up waiting for the light, before celebrating with their friends and families.

Constant walked out behind Don and Nora, as was his place. Eloise was beside him, as was hers as the next heir in line. She didn’t speak and neither did he. Through his riotous anticipation of what was coming – he barely remembered the last time he’d seen the sky alight – Constant was aware of Pech and Elspeth there, and Rainary standing guard, and then everything else left his mind because they were out in the wind and the snow and looking down and, _oh_.

“Oh my gosh,” breathed Eloise.

It seemed as though all of Cría was there looking up at them, packed so tightly together it was impossible to pick one face from another. Constant knew that Numair was down there somewhere, with Daine and Miel, but he’d never be able to see them. He feared, for a moment remembering the Beltane panic, but the fear quickly faded. Somehow, he knew, there’d be no riots, no panic tonight. The king had lit the Star. He’d rung the bells.

He’d called a truce.

For a good long while, in the crystalline hush of the night, Don said nothing. He just stared down and, though Constant couldn’t see his expression, he wondered if Don too was shocked at how many people had come here. Perhaps to see Nora, who they loved, but Constant also suspected many of them were here to see their king too, who’d fed them that day and who’d called them out. Who’d given them back Winterlight, if they forgave him for the loss of it in the first place.

Don opened his mouth. He closed it again. He swallowed, loudly.

Savigny stepped forward, touching his elbow. Standing, visible to the crowd, at the left hand of the king, as Nora stood at his right.

A sigh rippled across the crowd. An exhale of air that had been held, Constant thought, for four years, at least. A great weight had been lifted. He blinked back moisture from his own eyes, which was a hard task as it was cold enough to freeze on his lashes. Already, Nora’s furs were glittering with frost. Don with his blonde hair and pale skin seemed luminescent in the light spilling from the doors behind them. Stark as the snow that settled about his shoulders.

When Don spoke, finally, his voice was loud. He projected it cleanly, and Savigny, who held his arm still, projected it even further with his Gift. There wasn’t a person below who couldn’t hear him, Constant knew.

“Gallans,” Donatien said, every eye fixing on him, man, woman, child. Everyone. Nobles and commoners, anyone within eyesight. Constant couldn’t look away. He hoped, so furiously, that this was it. “I’ve struggled for years as your king. For the past four years of my reign, due to my inaction, we’ve had no light. I’ve allowed you all, my people, to become isolated.”

He stalled, breathing hard. Fog hot from his mouth.

Nora took his hand.

Another sigh from the crowd, a ripple of activity.

“No more,” he said. And again, louder, “No more. Tonight, we hold a light for my mother, your lost queen.”

Savigny lifted his other hand, the glittering pink of his Gift bursting into life and illuminating the balcony, the royals, everything. Spilling its light all around them, showing them entirely to the staring crowd.

“Winterlight is the festival of the dead,” Don cried, his face hollow in the witchlight. “Those lost in winter and in darkness, and those who would be lost without a light. Every soul lost in Galla these past years has been lost in darkness, abandoned by the king who should have sheltered them from the cold. At the rising of the moon and the falling of the first snow, we summon them home not in their spirits, which rest peacefully beyond our reach, but in the memories we hold of them. In the flames we hold because we are alive and we are together. Tonight, we hold their light.”

And in the lull that drifted down as he paused, flames glittered among the crowd, glints of lit candles cupped in sheltering hands. Mages with their palmfuls of coloured flames. Lamps held high to avoid burning another in the crush. So many lights that soon Constant couldn’t see the blur of faces anymore, but simply a sea of coloured stars, which Don looked down upon as the dark settled upon them. Winter, in all its passionate glory, was well and truly here.

“May the Black God carry our lights to those we’ve lost, to assure them that our memories of them burn just as brightly as they always have,” said Don into the glittering hush, something vivid and strange alight in his own eyes, something Constant had never seen before. Savigny too, was wild in his magelight, his own expression unfathomable. Constant was breathless, his eyes burning and his cheeks hot against the lines of ice he’d blinked down them. He was trembling and so was Eloise, but none of them looked away. “At the rising of the moon –” They looked up, a rustle of movement that was echoed below: “– and the falling of the first snow, I stand for you as I should have when I first bowed my head for the crown I wear, for the weight of my people that I bear gladly –” Here, again, he gasped a breath, and glanced wildly at Nora, who nodded: “– and for the future of our kingdom, the child my wife, your queen carries – the future king or queen of the Gallan people –”

Gods, the cheering. Constant reeled at the swell of noise that roared over them, drowning out Don’s words. He was forced to stop and wait for it to be done, and Nora was weeping openly with her tears ice upon her own cheeks. Constant swiped a sleeve over his face, which was wet with tears and melted snow and his nose running from the savage cold. He saw Savigny blinking his eyes clear, his lashes frozen. Pech wrapping Elspeth in his own cloak, letting her huddle against his side. And the cheering went on, it felt, for an eternity, as though making up for four years of waiting. Numair, wherever he was, was probably an icicle by now, but if he wasn’t Constant knew he’d be crying too, and Daine, and he wished he was with them so he could hold them as cry as he realised what the cheering was, what the feeling was, what this overwhelming pressure in his chest was: he hoped, as he never had before.

“The hope of our people,” said Donatien, King of Galla, _finally_ , the crowd going quiet, though Constant could still hear crying from somewhere. “As I should have years before, I call for the fire to light the sky as it did for those before us, to banish fear and prejudice, to unite our people against not just the death of winter but against the death of our community as well. I call for the mages of Galla for the fires to light our skies, to carry our memories to the Black God’s realm in anticipation of our eventual welcome, and to guide us through our darkest winter.”

Constant had to close his eyes; he’d never been this close to the lighting before. It was so bright, he felt blinded even through his closed eyelids. The mages behind him and the mages below, and Savigny too, all of them moved in unison, tapping into some great, wild magic that responded in turn to them. And the sky, despite the clouds, despite the snow, lit up: a great writhing light of greens and blues and purples, sparking with red and gold and every other colour, that undulated across Cría, visible for an unimaginable distance around them. It cried, as clearly as the bells, that no one below it was ever alone. It would stay as long as winter did, fading with the snow; a mimicry of the natural version of it that illuminated the furthest north of the world. How, thought Constant wildly, could Cole believe their gods had abandoned them? They were everything, in everything; Weiryn’s light burned above.

Again, they had to wait for the cheers to die down, all of them now lit by the green light of above. And then there was a hoarse silence, broken only by the wind, and Don stepped forward just slightly.

“We remember those who are lost,” he rasped, his voice almost gone. If it weren’t for Savigny, he’d have never been heard. “We see them free above us. We cherish the knowledge that all of us, every Gallan no matter where they’re born or to who, is a part of them as we live, as we die, as we last forever.”

And then, to the hushed shock of the crowd, Nora spoke.

“At the rising of the moon,” she said, her voice quieter but no less carrying, “we gather together, not to await the sun for we have no need. We are Gallans, born of darkness, united against the cold; and we, as Gallans, make our own light. So mote it be.”

It wasn’t truly words, the cry of the crowd. It was more a sigh of some huge beast with thousands of faces. But Constant knew that they, as he spoke, as Pech did, as Eloise, as everyone, whispered a prayer not to a god, because gods could turn their faces – though Constant thought, _he’d never_ – but to each other because their people would never either.

_So mote it be._

It was done. Savigny’s arm fell, releasing his hold on Don’s arm.

It was time to go home.

Numair dozed by the fire, covered in more blankets than he thought possible. He was exhausted and frozen right to his bones. Around him, excitement still buzzed; Constant wouldn’t stop talking about the address and the lighting, dancing about with his dogs as though the fires in the sky drove him with their unfathomable energy. Savigny was there, sitting before the fire with a mug of rum in one lazy hand, watching his brother. Don dozed in his own swaddle of blankets, Miel fast asleep in his arms. Numair had been surprised when he’d come back to the estate with them, cloaked against idle recognition, but Daine had whispered to him that, before everything, they’d always spent the night of Winterlight together. Nora had told him to slip away once his duty was done and take a night to be, not a king, but himself. Daine was sitting cross legged on the rug, drinking her own mug of spiced rum. George slept upstairs, as he’d barely made it through the address – woken only by the shock of the sky lighting up. Even now, exhausted, almost asleep, Numair’s mind was _alive_ with the memory of it, the incredible show of collective magic. He knew that Tortall mages knew nothing as unified as what he’d seen tonight, and he burned to go back and teach them of it.

And Numair dozed …

He flickered awake to a cold hand on his shoulder, opening his eyes to find the fire burned down and Daine leaning over him. She pressed a finger to her lips, pulling him up. Sleepy, he stumbled upright without questioning her. Blankets pooling from his shoulders and he mumbled a complaint, but she was already wrapping a fur cloak around him. Some time had passed. Constant was asleep on the bed with his dogs wrapped in the bedding with him. Don was stretched on the floor beside Miel, both asleep. Savigny, too, slept, though propped upright beside them, one of his hands draped across Don’s hip. It was so quiet, except for the dying crackle of the fire, that Numair could hear carousing from the staff below, who celebrated their own Winterlights, and more from outside.

Daine took his hand and tugged.

Numair, always pliable when he was dozy, followed.

She led him outside, which he whined about. Of course, that didn’t stop her. Ruthlessly, she dragged him across the fresh snow – he was glad she’d allowed him time to grab his boots – until they were standing in the glittering whiteness of the courtyard. Below the snow was the flat slate he’d accidentally created saving Constant.

“Can you turn it to ice?” Daine asked, turning on him.

Numair blinked, looking at it.

“What kind of ice?” he asked suspiciously, not liking the way she was smiling or her hands hidden behind her back. Cheers sounded from the street, drunken voices bellowing. It was so _cold_. He shoved his hands into his pockets and scowled at her.

Daine sighed before revealing what she was carrying; two sets of skates, blades glittering wickedly.

“No,” said Numair, turning to go back inside.

But she caught his arm, pulling him back around. “Wait,” she breathed. “Listen. I’ve been thinking, ‘bout what comes next. You’re going home, I know. And … you said, once, that you’d teach me whenever I was ready. Well, I’m ready, I think. I want to learn about my magic, about who I am. Even …” She closed her eyes, ghostly in the reflected light from the snow, before opening them. They were lovely, Numair struck once more by them. “Even if that means leaving home, just for a while.”

Flushed pretty by the cold, she looked up at him. He could tell she was terrified of his rejection, but energised by the bravery of asking.

“Daine,” he sighed, brushing a lock of hair from her eyes. “You know I’ve always got a place for you with me. If you want to be taught, I’ve all the time in the world for you. And you’ll love Tortall. But I don’t understand – why are the skates relevant?”

Daine laughed, as though she hadn’t expected him to ask this. The sound carried so nicely.

“If I’m going to be taught by such a silly beast as you,” she teased, “I need to know you’ll listen to me too, when needed. I’ve got things to teach _you_ too, you know. Skating, for one.”

“Oh no,” he breathed.

“Oh yes,” was her vengeful reply. “Payback for all that meditation. Skate with me and I’ll go with you to Tortall and see your tower and you can show me all the silly Tortallan things you do down there. I just … I want to live my life as though it’s bigger than I am, as though maybe I’m someone who _could_ be the child of a god. Not that I want to be a child of … well, you know. Just so my life matches me, even if just for a little bit. This sounds so daft.”

“Not daft at all,” he said. “I can’t think of anyone who deserves a life of splendour more than you, magelet.”

She flushed again and looked down at her feet.

Numair pondered that for a while. He doubted that she’d refuse to go with him if he said no, but it didn’t seem a good way to begin their adventure together. So, eventually – and with a longing look up at the green-lashed sky, the skyfire writhing above still – he walked out into the courtyard and examined it.

In the end, he did make the courtyard ice, a beautiful expanse of flatness. Unfortunately, he made a lot more ice than just the courtyard, Daine bursting into laughter when she uncovered her eyes and saw the glittering prisms he’d liberally covered this entire side of the estate with, spirals of ice jerked up from the ground and cascading down the side of the wall and building. Even the snow briefly ceased to fall lightly and instead tinkled to the ground, shattering around them.

“Oops,” Numair murmured.

“It’s _lovely_ ,” was Daine’s response, which was very true. It was lovely. The skyfire reflected in all the delicate ice, making them glitter green and blue as though they were surrounded by hundreds of tiny flames. Sliding awkwardly on his boots, Numair ungracefully made his way back to Daine and accepted the skates from her, though he paused to brush snow from her shoulders as he went.

“Flirt,” she accused him.

He poked his tongue out at her.

Don woke to Daine laughing, sitting up to find the fire barely burning. Constant was blinking drowsily but somewhat awake, and Savigny was no longer beside him. Yawning, Don sat up, peering at the partially open external door to the balcony and seeing Savigny standing out there, looking down.

“What’s this?” mumbled Constant, wiggling deeper into the blankets and hugging Earnest tight to himself. Earnest, on his back, feet askew, snored.

“Nothing, darling,” said Don, kissing Miel and tucking her into her cushiony bed as he slid out of the covers. “Go back to sleep.”

“Mmk,” was the answer, Constant going quiet.

Don slipped out the doors, closing them behind him to spare the sleepers the icy breeze. He found Savigny watching Daine and Numair in the courtyard, a strange smile on his face. Don peered down too. The courtyard, somehow, had been turned to ice, glittering and beautiful. It was an alien landscape now, unfamiliar and stark even in its magnificence. The expanse of the slate was now a perfectly smooth plane of flat, black ice, and Daine was skating slowly around it backwards with Numair’s hands in hers, trying to teach him to skate with her. He wasn’t very good, but they were both laughing.

“She’s going to Tortall,” said Savigny, his voice low so the skaters wouldn’t hear him and look up. “They’ll leave come spring.”

It was cold out here. Don shivered and Savigny automatically stepped close to him, pressing their sides together as he slid the blanket he was wearing around Don’s shoulders too. Don considered only briefly the awkwardness of the moment, before giving in to his desire to be warm and letting Sav slip a familiar arm around his shoulders, leaning his head on him.

“I’m going to miss her,” he said mournfully. It seemed Daine had always been there, with them. What would they do without her?

“As will I,” said Sav with a sigh. “But she’ll be happy there, I think.”

There was more in her words than he was saying.

“Do you think she’ll come home?” Don asked, watching Numair slip and stumble, Daine almost skidding out under his awkward weight. They hadn’t even noticed they were being watched, so caught up in each other.

Sav said, “No. I don’t.”

And they were quiet under the weight of that.

A sombre sound leapt into the air, Don and Sav looking up as one across the wall, across the street, to the neighbouring glint of light from the Darragon Estate. Too far to make out details, but they could see the shape of a woman standing on the balcony, and the silhouette of a man beside her. Don grinned, fancying he could see from here the plume of smoke from the man’s pipe. Again, the sound, Savigny straightening.

It had been so long since Don had stood upon this balcony, listening to the beautiful strikes of Elspeth de Darragon’s vielle, the cry of her music. It was different than it had been last time he’d stood here under the Winterlight sky. Tonight, it was sorrowful, grieving her lost love and all those lost before him. Don wondered if she was playing for her daughter as well as Adel, and if Pech was thinking of his brothers and parents. He looked at Sav and saw the memory of his parents in his eyes, and then he looked down and saw that Numair and Daine had stopped and were listening too. He hoped he’d spoken well tonight, and made it clear that he was with his people in their grief because, oh, there was simply _so_ much grief in his people.

Another sound joined in, this time the rhythmic beat of a percussion instrument from several buildings north. Another vielle from the east, striking boldly under a more amateur hand. Don fancied he could hear the wail of several woodwind instruments of different pitches too, though they fought the wind harder than the clearer tones of the others. In the depths of winter, when the snows grew too fierce for even the tunnels to be safe, sometimes music was the only way they had to tell each other they were still alive.

With so many playing together, they’d fallen into a familiar song. It was the tale of Winterlight, Elspeth leading the way as she had every year before they’d stopped and, Don hoped, she would for years to come. They listened in silence until the music drowned the wind, and it was as though they were listening to the heart of Galla itself singing for them.

The door clicked open, Constant padding out sleepily.

“I heard Elspeth,” he said, coming to the rail. He glanced down, going, ‘Oh!’ with surprise but not querying it further. “Is this the Winterlight tale?”

Don just nodded, watching Savigny out of the corner of his eye. Constant listened for a moment with his head tilted, then he grinned and slid in front of them, pushing himself into the middle of their blanket. Don laughed as Savigny grumbled, forced to drop his arm from Don’s shoulders – but, as they were pulled apart, Don felt a thrill of illicit pleasure as Savigny snuck his arm back behind his brother and tangled just the tips of his fingers with Don’s. The barest clasp of their hands.

“Do you remember the words?” Constant asked Savigny, turning to look at him with a wicked smile. With another thrill, Don realised that Constant was _tall_ now, almost the same height as Don and easily able to match his brother’s stare. Somehow, he’d missed the boy growing in the chaos of the last years.

“I don’t –” began Savigny, but Constant ignored him; still grinning, still wicked, he gripped the rail, opened his mouth, and sang. It was Old Gallan, most of the words untranslatable now. But his voice was clear and bold, and it joined the music without missing a beat. Elspeth’s vielle leapt with excitement at the realisation that words had come, spurring Constant on.

Don met Sav’s eyes. He looked down and realised Daine and Numair – still holding hands – were looking up at them. And he said, “I will if you will.”

And so they did.

Glory, how he’d missed Savigny’s singing.

“Numair?” Savigny asked, looking up at the knock at his door. It was late enough to technically be considered morning as his visitor slipped in, visible only for a moment against the light in the door before it closed behind him. Savigny in his bed, quiet in the blankets; his visitor watching him with careful wariness.

Savigny, softly, “Was the guest bed not to your liking, prince?”

And his visitor laughing softly as to not wake the girl in his arms, creeping across the room. Savigny lifted the blankets to allow them to slip into the bed, Miel tucked on the side with a pillow set to stop her falling from the edge and Don in the centre, half-turned to look at Savigny, to dare him to say anything.

Savigny didn’t. He just leaned forward, kissed his king gently upon the mouth – they both gasped at the contact, Savigny’s mouth turning down into a grimace as though the touch _hurt_ with the intensity of it – and he whispered, “Sleep best, love.”

Don didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

There weren’t words enough in the world.


	42. In The Deaths of Winter

Winter blew in cold and hard, as though they’d invited it by lighting the winterlights. Leaving the estate, while not impossible, became perilous, with even the ice tunnels so bitterly cold that brushing against the side of them was painful even through a layer of thick wool. Numair, who’d never lived through anything like this in Tortall and certainly not Carthak, was shocked at how fast it moved. The others laughed at his reactions, taking it in turns to tell him stories about worse winters, fiercer snows, colder snaps.

George just listened, a thin smile creasing his lined face.

Numair suspected George wasn’t handling being cooped up in the estate very well. Though they were learning fast why Gallans had such a reputation for artistry, with everyone in the building including the staff very able to whittle away time locked inside by creating beautiful things, neither Numair nor George were very artistic. And, as fascinating as Numair found it to huddle by the fire watching Savigny speed-knit tiny woollen shoes for Don’s unborn baby, George didn’t quite share his interest in the other man. Though, he was pleased when Savigny knitted him a scarf after he commented on how much he liked the one Sav made Numair, which Numair guarded with the greedy adoration of a dragon over a horde of precious metals. It was all Numair’s favourite colours and uneven on the ends, and he wore it constantly. George, pleased, wore his too, which served him well as he paced the cold hallways looking out the windows at the growing mountains of snow.

So it was left to Numair to entertain George, and he did his best. George caught him up on everything he’d missed in Tortall, the children’s antics and Alanna’s missions before this last one. They veered quickly away from the topic of Alanna, George because it clearly hurt him to speak of it and Numair because he’d been reminded that Alanna and Sarge were making a winter crossing to Carthak and he was sick at the thought. Then they talked of Galla, George listening politely as Numair bubbled over happily with all the things here he loved and would miss dearly when he returned home. They talked of the catacombs, and Daine’s teachings, and how Don had improved. They talked of Don, George going thoughtful as Numair described his mind illness.

“I think it’s fairly unlikely that he still has attacks of the mind because of that wood stuff,” was George’s thoughts on it as Numair admitted to him that he knew Don still had bad days. Those days, though they were rarer now, he knew Don stayed in his room and refused audiences with anyone, Nora fielding them for him. While Don had never told Numair what the ‘bad days’ fully entailed, Constant had, and Numair was uneasy about them. “After all, you went under it twice and doesn’t seem like it’s stuck around forever on you.”

“He was under it for years, though,” was Numair’s sensible response.

George fiddled with the end of his scarf. Like Numair, he wasn’t handling the extreme cold too well, even though the rooms were quite warm and this one in particular, the study, was magically warmed. Perhaps he just liked wearing it. He did seem to enjoy making Daine giggle, and she giggled every time she saw them swanning around in their crooked knitwear, Savigny hiding his pleasure behind his rapidly clicking needles.

“Maybe,” said George slowly. “And it might well be you’re right and those attacks will fade as he gets further away from those days. But he’s got instability in his family, for want of a better word. They used to say the Gallan kings were known for being split-minded, sane one moment and raving the next. Queens too, though rarer. I’ve seen it too, in my work. You get plenty of odd ones in Rogue’s courts and, yeah, even flocking to the Whisper Man. Usually out of desperation because it makes it hard to work elsewhere. Point is, they act the same as what you describe – waves of scatter-mindedness, paranoia, seeing what’s not there. Lost somewhere between our living world and the next, I’ve heard it described, with no understanding of which is which.”

Numair didn’t like it, but he knew too what George was talking of. There wasn’t a name for it as neat as the Black God’s shock, mostly because no god wanted it placed into their lap. It didn’t help their popularity, being known for madness.

“He’s not mad,” said Numair. “He’s as sane as you or I. He just has bad days.”

George shrugged. “I don’t doubt it. I didn’t say otherwise. Mithros knows I’ve never turned away a promising birdie because of it, if they can manage the bad days well enough. But I never forget that they’re limited in capability. I’ve not got the luxury of that. A bad day in the field gets them killed and maybe others too. Strain will make it worse, sleeplessness. Liquors. Fear. And if a break gets bad enough, there’s not much that will slow it down till the brain runs out of steam, that’s just the unfortunate world of it. Not much of a diagnosis for a king, I’m afraid. There’s no healing, no cure. No magic potion or herb. Just riding out the bad days and hoping no damage is done that can’t be undone.”

He took a long pull from his hot drink, sighing at the end of it.

“Some people just never get a reprieve from the hands that the gods deal them,” he said quietly into that sigh, sounding as sorry as George ever really did.

Numair wondered if he was thinking of Alanna. He didn’t feel much up to speaking more on Don’s sanity, occupying himself by tidying up his desk. It was a mess of papers as he’d gone through everything to find what would interest George. Now, he ducked out of sight to the lower drawers, unlocking them via magic and feeling a small twinge of surprise as two glass globes rolled towards him. One, he’d expected, lifting it out and feeling the barest trace of his Gift within it. The other, empty as well and returned to its clear state, was Savigny’s.

“What are those?” asked George curiously.

“We – Savigny and I – were using them to store constructs as we built them. I finished mine, so I had no need of it anymore.” Numair lifted up Savigny’s globe and studied it. “I guess Savigny must have finished his too, though he didn’t mention it. I can’t see him having erased all his work otherwise.” He looked up, spotting George’s baffled expression and reminding himself that George wasn’t a mage, a jarring thought after so long being surrounded only by mages. “It’s a, uh, magical construction, of a sort. In this case, it was the framework of a shapeshifting spell, much as I did to learn how to shape myself as a hawk.”

George caught up fairly quickly.

“You’ve another creature shape then?” he asked, sitting upright. Now that Numair’s hawk shape had been discovered, it was of no small interest to George if Numair had created another without revealing it.

“I have,” Numair responding, blushing without meaning to. He hoped George hadn’t seen it, but knew it was a slim hope. George saw all. “It was on a whim. I thought perhaps something a little fiercer, maybe.”

That wasn’t the reason. Numair himself wasn’t even sure of the reason. He thought that maybe Daine’s tale had affected him more than he’d expected. It really had been a whim, arguably, though driven by some underlying desire he had avoided trying to understand. Some deeply buried fear that he was trying to supress by giving himself the means to control it.

“What beast?” asked George.

Eventually, Numair managed to confess that which he hadn’t told anyone yet, not even Savigny, who he was sure would read more in it than Numair thought was actually there.

Hoping his expression wasn’t giving away this gamut of emotions, Numair said, “Wolf.”

George and Savigny, oddly, seemed to be growing quite fast friends. Numair would often come into a room and finding them with their heads close together, speaking in whispers. Neither of them brought Numair into the contents of their discussions, and nor did Numair presume to ask, but he wondered what the basis of their friendliness was. Neither seemed happy when they spoke and there was an air of great seriousness around the discussions, but they didn’t avoid each other either so he doubted there was bitterness or dislike there.

Baffled but aware of his nose’s limitations in sniffing out secrets, especially where these two men were concerned, Numair let them be.

He turned his attentions instead to Daine, who was using her snowed-in time to pester him endlessly for as much information on her magic as he could possibly give her. This was quite a bit; they passed endless happy days together discussing her strengths, her potential abilities, and her deadly lack of control. Sometimes, if the mood took her, she turned the discussion towards the book Numair had found in Dieudonné’s catacomb study. Particularly the parts detailing the man’s experiments on Daine and Constant, which Numair knew had bothered her for months.

“Do you think I really did affect Constant’s magic?” she fretted at Numair, holding the book so tight she was in danger of tearing the thin pages. “Lord Hartholm sure did. He said it was like pouring fat on a fire, what my blood did to Constant’s weirdness.”

“Not his weirdness,” Numair corrected her. “His wild magic. And, potentially.”

That wasn’t the answer she’d wanted, going sour and moody in her seat and hunching away from him, like Earnest when he got scolded.

“The wolves, my wolves,” she said, “they changed when they licked me, cleaning blood from my wounds. Got smarter, more human-like. Began thinking differently. I never worried before this that it would happen to humans too … maybe those Red Temple priests are right. Maybe I _am_ a plague.”

“Hardly a terrible one,” was Numair’s response. “We could all use more understanding of those who share our world, especially those who can’t speak.” He added, quieter, “You taught me that.”

The thankful look she gave him kept him warm for a week, even as the blizzards outside raged on. It grew so cold that they sealed whole wings of the estate as being too dangerous to walk through, from the weight of the snow against the walls and the ability of the frigid air to snap-freeze an unprepared person who wandered into them without appropriate clothing. Numair tried heating the remaining rooms for them and the staff and their families living in, but this caused another issue as the radiant heat melted the snow against the walls and water began to seep through the floors, the building not used to being frozen and thawed in such a manner.

Constant, who was staying with them over the winter, wandered in, stopping that conversation; Daine didn’t want him to know and Numair was respecting that, certain that she’d speak to him on her own one day, when she was ready.

“Are you talking about leaving again?” he asked Daine, eyes narrowed with suspicion. He hadn’t taken that particular bit of news too well, flipping from deeply unhappy to furious about it. Numair didn’t blame him; for someone so young, Constant had said goodbye to so many people. No matter how much Daine told him it wasn’t forever, Constant still seemed torn on whether he was going to forgive her for going at all.

“No,” said Daine shortly. She didn’t like engaging with him when he got what she called ‘broody’ about it. Unlike Sav, who she sniped at constantly and didn’t mind when he nipped back, bickering with Constant was unfamiliar to her, and uncomfortable for them both. Numair, wisely, kept out of it.

He slipped out and left them to it, going to find Savigny.

He found him idling his way around the parlour closest to Daine’s room. “I’ve a mind to decorate for Midwinter,” he said as Numair walked in. “It’s not really a celebration here, mind, but you made it sound so appealing. It could be nice, even if we’re still rationed.”

He turned on Numair with his new grin, not even the illusions he wore obsessively managing to completely hide the slight distortion of his mouth. As he turned, he tugged something out of his pocket.

“See what I’ve bought Daine,” he said after a furtive look around, Numair going to take from him the thin chain. On the end of it was a small locket and, when Numair used his nail to push it open, he found that within the locket were two portraits, in tiny perfect detail. On one side, a miniature of the portrait that stood up in Constant’s room still, of Don and Daine and Savigny and Constant, young and holding each other. The other side was Savigny, Don, and Constant as they were now, a sitting which Numair was certain hadn’t taken place. “Pech painted them, from memory. I … I wasn’t going to have Don added, but I felt she would want all of us with her, going so far from home.”

He looked away, embarrassed. Numair did him the favour of not looking up at him; though the weather didn’t permit easy travel now, he knew very well that for several weeks after Winterlight, there had been a secretive nightly visitor to Savigny’s chambers, one who wore a hood to conceal his identity. It had amused he and Daine very much that Don thought he was so sneaky he hadn’t been noticed, though he stabled his horse with theirs. His horse which could, and did, greet Daine enthusiastically as soon as she was within range.

“It’s beautiful, Savigny,” he said, meaning it.

Savigny shrugged with one shoulder, as awkward as ever when he was feeling gentle. “I thought of getting you one, but it felt impertinent,” he said. “Now we’ve parted our beds once more.”

Numair would have loved one, but he didn’t have the words to express this. He mumbled something noncommittal and gave the locket back, slinking out of the room feeling hollowed out. It hurt him, how much he knew his taking Daine away was going to impact them; but she was her own person, her own power, and this was her choice. He wasn’t taking her anywhere but where she longed to go, and she deserved a life that was wholly her own.

But he’d miss them too, when they went. So he couldn’t imagine how they all felt, except that, maybe, he could. Sometimes he woke in the night thinking Varice was calling him from the next room, only to realise that she wasn’t and she couldn’t, and she never would.

Winter, as terrible as it was, seemed almost too short when he considered what lay at the end of it.

Two days later, midway through breaking their fast – a joyous, noisy affair, as they ate with the staff and their families, who had finally gotten used to their marquis looking sleepy in their midst as he chewed on some boggy porridge – was when it happened. It was such a strange feeling, as though the ground had rolled below them. Not bucked, it wasn’t that violent. It was a slow rolling shove with three times the force of a buck, and none of them even realised it was happening until it was over. A roomful of shocked people crumpled on the ground, broken bowls, the huge oak table shunted out of place. The great oven had rocked open and hot coals and burning wood had spilled out, someone staggering up to quickly push them away from limbs and clothes. Their ears rang from the earthy growl that had occurred. Numair could hear the horses screaming in their stables, the wind having dropped sometime during the night, and somewhere nearby Constant’s dogs were barking themselves silly. A child began to cry.

“An earthshake?” Numair asked in the dull, shocked aftermath.

Savigny was rubbing his elbow as he hauled himself up, porridge splattered all over his clothes. Most everyone else was wearing some or all of their meals, so no one there judged him for it. “Have we ever had an earthshake here?” he asked the assembled room.

Someone seemed to have remembered themselves and there was a flurry of activity, three separate people diving to offer him something to wipe himself with. He waved them all off, going for the external door despite his relative state of porridgey undress. Numair, wrapping his crooked scarf around him better, followed.

At the first glance, nothing outside seemed amiss. Things had fallen over and one wall looked like it was at a minutely differently angle, but structures were still doing as they should and Numair couldn’t hear any screams. The thick carpet of snow which was clear around the door but, beyond that, would cover him easily to his waist or above, looked fluffy and untouched. Savigny eyed it.

“It’s churned,” he said, turning back to the door. Numair gave him a baffled look: “Aerated. It’s not great news. One, it’s horrible to walk in. You can’t get any firm ground under your boots so you’ll sink as deep as the snow goes, which is deep enough to be deadly outside of sheltering walls and where it builds up. Two, it gets warm air under the snow, which thaws it low and then builds ice. Dangerous to walk on, and dangerous on slopes where the ice below is thick and liable to dump it.”

Now, he turned to glance up at the mountain behind them, expression grim. The rest of the household spilled out and, though none of them were looking to him, Numair felt something sickly start up in his stomach as they all did the same. All those anxious eyes, turned to the snow-capped slopes that towered over Cría. 

“Or,” said Sav with an uneasy tone to his voice, “it compresses.”

Then, Numair heard it. From here, it was a soft sound, though he doubted it was closer to the source. Like a low, thick thunder roll, wet and echoing. It drifted down from above.

And then the mountain began to move.

For a bizarre moment, Numair thought the whole thing was coming down on them, staggering back with his eyes feeling like they were goggling out of his head. But no one else moved, though he saw plenty of other expressions of gaping horror. His first wild thought had been wrong; it wasn’t the mountain coming down, at least, not all of it.

From a flat plane of white, it was as though the slope had bucked all the snow off of it. The mass of white churned up and began to slide down in a horrible great pack, building swiftly into a flurry of brown and white and grey as it picked up debris in its path, more snow, more ice, more horror. It was big enough to see it approach even though they weren’t close, not even close enough to truly hear the roar of it. Only a very distant knowledge of sound.

“It won’t hit us,” someone said in a voice Numair suspected was supposed to be comforting. “They weren’t silly when they built Cría. We’re not in the dumping path.”

“The Bog sprawls beyond sensible bounds,” was Savigny’s quiet response. He was taut with horror, and Numair realised he’d already seen where the avalanche was going. He didn’t even stay to watch it hit; he turned rapidly and began issuing orders to clear the lower floors and set up beds, to gather medical supplies, to alert the palace and others who would offer help. And then he was gone, running inside. Numair knew he should follow but he was too fascinated in such an awful way to go just yet.

He stayed there watching until the white wave vanished below what he could see above the city skyline. And he watched a little longer, until he felt the impact and saw the flurries of snow and dust it kicked into the air. It shook his whole body, right to his core.

Then he turned and ran for his clothes, ready to do whatever was needed to help.

Long from this day, Numair would be unable to talk about it. He’d seen terrible things in his life, of course, but the utter devastation of a natural disaster left him speechless. An avalanche with a whole mountainside of debris churned up inside it, smashing over a populated area of ramshackle houses until it came to a final stop against the towering city walls. A whole population of people who had been alive this morning now buried under a mountain of snow …

It was too awful.

Vast swathes of the Bog had been protected by the city walls that had failed the outer quarter so fatally. Despite the low ground that they were built on meaning that they were pushing through chest-high snow to get there, it seemed as though every Bog citizen and then some had piled out to the sphere of devastation that awaited them. They were already out and digging by the time Numair arrived with his companions.

The force of the impact had buckled the wall, which was now bowed inward at the bottom as though it was kneeling for a king. There was no getting out through the gates, which had blown in and was now a mess of splintered wood, twisted iron, and cracked snow strewn through the grimy snow that had pushed past. To get out there, they had to climb uneasy staircases half torn from the stone they’d once firmly huddled against, right to the now sloping top of the barely standing wall. Then they could look out over what awaited them below, a mass of brown-tinged snow surprisingly free of debris at a first glance. Savigny’s guess was that it had all been shoved to the front and as such had hit the walls first, the lighter snow rolling on top of it until it had settled into this deceptively calm landscape that they saw.

It seemed so impossible that this flat land had been a home to so many, that all those homes – hundreds, easily, maybe even more – of people who’d been existing happily were now gone until the snow melted and revealed the true devastation.

But there was no time to contemplate it. As they ridden hard to get here, Numair had been told the grim outcome of today: after the first fifteen minutes, the chances of digging someone out alive from under an avalanche dropped dramatically. After two hours, it was extremely unlikely there’d be anyone left alive at all under there. And through the snow and the distance that they’d come, it had already taken them almost forty minutes.

Wordless, they went to the ladders already set up by those who’d gotten there first, one by one climbing down to join the frantically searching groups already out there.

There wasn’t much Numair could do with his Gift. He couldn’t magic snow into the air like he could boulders and, besides, doing something so huge while so many people were atop the snow as well as under it, as well as digging down into it, would be catastrophic. He couldn’t summon a great heat to melt the snow unless he wanted to flood the entire Bog and turn it all to ice shortly after, fatally drenching every searcher there. His wasn’t the kind of Gift that could search for faint flickers of life below them. All he could do, as most everyone else was, was dig and hope for the best. And he was desperate to do so; deep down, in his coldest, darkest place, he wondered if this was his fault. Had he done this, the same as he’d toppled half of Savigny’s estate with his reckless use of magic to save Constant’s life?

He didn’t know but, just in case, he dug like he had. But there was just snow, and rocks, and wood. And more snow. Once, a body, twisted and still. Nothing to be done.

It was so cold but he was working so hard he was sweating, half overheated, half frozen. Time kept ticking and he was barely aware of where he was or who was around him, just that he knew Daine and Constant and even George were here somewhere, digging just like he was. Savigny had already organised survivors to be taken back to the estate, or those who were made homeless. Numair needed to be at least as helpful as that, but time kept ticking and he hadn’t found anyone _alive_ , and he desperately needed to know there was someone still living in this mess –

A hand touched his arm and he whirled, almost falling through the snow. It held their weight, barely, but he’d been warned of the dangers of empty pockets that could dump him into a drift if he wasn’t careful. Boards of wood had been set up and people were being encouraged to lean their weight on them to dig, lest they end up needing rescuing too.

On the board beside him, kneeling, was Daine. Numair stood in the snow, exhausted and trembling. Buried to his waist, at this point, his hands clutched the blunted shovel he’d been given. Daine was shaking too. She looked frantic.

“They want to help,” she said to him.

He had no idea what she was talking about and looking around, at first, didn’t help. They’d come pretty far from the wall in their efforts, and the searchers were thinner out here.

Then he turned to follow her eyeline, and he saw exactly who ‘they’ were.

He swallowed.

“I think they can feel how upset I am,” Daine added nervously, peering around at the forest edge which hadn’t been cleared by the fall, where animals lurked along the trees. Owls in the branches and foxes in their white coats prowling below. Rabbits binkying away from the foxes nervously, their own white coats making them hard to spot against the snow. Numair even saw a couple of badgers who hadn’t, unlike the others, waited for Daine’s permission. They trundled up without fear and began sniffing at the snow before setting their paws to work and vanishing below in a shuffle of quickly moving ice.

There was a gasp and Numair glanced around, seeing Constant coming up with his eyes wide over the scarf he’d pulled around his mouth. That decided it for Numair.

“Tell them to help, if they will,” he told Daine. “If there’s anyone left alive, they’re our best chance of finding them.”

It was bizarre, working alongside foxes that hopped along the snow with ease, their large ears focused below. If they heard something, they gave their odd screeching barks and began to dig, a sign to hurry over and help. The rabbits didn’t bark, but they too put their ears to work, stamping when they wanted a human to come dig with them before they tunnelled down and out of sight. Numair had to be careful not to hit them with the blade of his shovel, though he realised quickly that they dug far faster then he did. Owls, too, were less helpful as sleepy as they were, but they could hear below the snow with the pinpoint accuracy of any fox, even if they couldn’t dig. Many of them decided their best chance of getting Numair’s attention was to swoop past and buff him with the edge of a silent wing. Always him, for some reason. He supposed it was because he was at a nice swooping height.

With the animals help, they found four people who were somehow still alive, as cold and barely breathing as they were when Numair pulled them up onto the boards and hollered for someone to come fetch them.

Four. Out of hundreds.

Oh, Numair wanted to cry. But it was too cold for tears.

If he’d hoped no one would notice their strange helpers, this hope was quickly proven untenable. Perhaps they wouldn’t have, since the wild animals stuck to the outskirts while most of the humans focused on the areas closer to the city walls. Except, Daine had other friends who weren’t as wary of those who walked on two legs.

Numair noticed as he carried the fourth person they’d found, a young girl, across the boards and back to the larger group of searchers, where there were people with warm drinks and blankets. He noticed the uneasy feeling, and then he noticed the reason for it. There were dogs everywhere, and not dogs obeying anyone in particular. Just, dogs. Dogs who worked silently and intently right alongside the humans, sniffing and then digging without looking to a handler. There were so many there was no ignoring the fact that they were here helping without anyone making them, and every human was giving them an extremely wide berth.

Sometimes, a dog would bark for help and a human would sidle over nervously to help it dig. Sadly, the dogs didn’t search like the foxes and the owls. They used their noses, not so much their ears.

They’d never had found as many bodies as they did without the dogs, though.

Numair handed the girl over, told a woman who looked like she was in charge to tell people to work with the dogs instead of fearing them, and then trudged back out into his snow-tipped nightmare.

They were definitely not finding anyone alive now. It had been hours. Numair kept at it because he knew if this was his fault, he owed it to those who died to get them out now. Hideously, many people had given up once two hours had passed. It seemed like they figured the thaw would reveal all, eventually. Numair was sickened by this thought. Many of the animals had slipped back into the forest as soon as they’d stopped hearing any sounds below the snow. Interestingly, they hadn’t just dug out humans, and Numair realised dully that he shouldn’t have expected them to; they’d summoned him to dig out cats, dogs, a horse, and even two stunned fox kits who were somehow still alive and together, huddled in an air pocket created by two houses slumping together.

He was beyond exhausted now but he kept going. Even as the temperature dropped and it began to snow again. He wasn’t the only person persisting, he knew. There were others here who obviously had family or friends buried and who were frantic to keep going, no matter the danger. Numair decided he’d stay as long as they did.

The area he was in he was in alone though, having to lay his own boards down as he picked across. Earnest was with him, Bon Bon having gotten too cold to keep digging. But Earnest didn’t seem to feel the cold, though with every body they found Numair could see the normally unflappable hound’s sadness growing. He did his best to comfort the hound, but he too was feeling the weight of it on his soul.

They’d just found an elderly lady, Earnest helping Numair ease her out. She was stiff by now, as difficult to manoeuvre as one of the wooden boards Numair was dragging along. He laid her upon the board, half in and half out of the snow, and leaned his head against Earnest as exhaustion and grief hit thick and hard. It was dark and he didn’t have the energy to summon a magelight. He hadn’t seen Daine or Constant, or Savigny, for hours.

The board creaked under someone’s weight.

Numair looked up. The patchwork mage stood over him, colourless in this alien landscape. Their face was expressionless.

“Nonny,” Numair greeted them, uneasy with their height over him. “Come to help?”

“There’s not a life left under winter’s touch,” was Nonny’s low response, though they squatted on the boards to reduce the looming effect of their standing over him. “Nonny comes to see the mage and learn why he exhausts himself to find the dead who’ll wait patiently until spring. It’s something the dead are very good at, being patient.”

“They deserve finding,” said Numair sharply. He wanted to crawl out of the snow, which even his layers were beginning to struggle to keep him dry from. But he didn’t want to do so in front of Nonny, as he would be entirely vulnerable while pulling himself up onto the boards. At least, in the snow, he could grip the shovel. Earnest was quiet, watching them both.

Nonny stared at him, eyes as colourless as the rest of them. This was unsettling. Numair was certain they’d been green last time, the same shade as Savigny’s. Unless that had been an illusion too.

“Raven is dead, too,” said Nonny, looking away. “You killed her.”

Numair tightened his grip on the shovel. He wished he could speak to Earnest, to tell him to go get Savigny, or George. That tone in Nonny’s voice, it didn’t bode well for him at all. And he didn’t know what the assassin was capable of.

“I’ve no say in his life,” Numair answered carefully. “If he doesn’t want to return to your people, that’s his choice. You cannot possibly imply that he’s not still supporting your cause, though. Is your city not at more peace right now than it’s been in years, even without his mask?”

Nonny’s head lashed around, savage hatred in their expression, and Numair almost fell back into the snow as he took a step back away from that. Earnest, finally, began to growl.

“ _She_ is not yours to take!” snarled the assassin, hunching over with their fingers biting deep into the wood of the board. They stood, turned, turned back, paced. Savage, jerking strides, like a lion tormented by captivity. “Raven is ours, she is _mine_. I created her and you come, and you … you _infect_ her with the pestilence that remains. We fight so hard to cut away the excess and you come with your pretty smiles and your kisses and make the leftover bits feel worthy.”

Numair blinked, lost. “I don’t think I …” he began.

Then he thought about what they were saying and a slow, deep anger whipped up in his gut, as dangerous as the churning of the snow.

“When you say excess,” he said, Earnest snarling when he heard the tone of Numair’s voice, “you mean Savigny, don’t you? You mean all the parts that _you_ don’t like. That he’s a noble –”

“A flaw of birth,” Nonny snapped.

“– that he’s no lover of violence, of nasty tricks like yours –”

“We taught her better,” was Nonny’s snide response.

“– and that he’s, what? What else do you loathe? What else is _excess?_ ”

Nonny circled again. They were twitchy, anxious. Angry. Afraid. “The man,” they hissed. “The man is excess. We don’t want that, want him. She has no need of him. He is soft and weak and wrong. We taught her better. We _told_ her that she won’t feel comfort in herself without cutting that away, and all that comes with it. Brother, lover, sister …”

Nonny turned, slower now, to look down on Numair.

They added, quietly, “… friend.”

Numair gripped the shovel tighter. His Gift was poised, ready. He’d like to see them try.

“There’s no part of Savigny I would ever see him reject,” he said, heart hammering hard. “Even if he chooses to return to Raven, I wouldn’t reject him. If I love him, I love her, even if the idea of her frightens me.”

“That,” said Nonny, “is because you accept mediocrity.”

Numair straightened, right as the snow under his feet – disturbed by his removal of the woman’s body – shifted violently, his boots sliding him straight into one of the pockets Savigny had warned him about. Without warning, Numair was suddenly under the snow and dropping fast, his yell of shock swallowed by that which now suffocated him. It was absolutely terrifying and utterly disorientating, as he didn’t fall straight down in a way that allowed him to know which way was up. Even when his wild flailing crashing him against something that bruised even though his thick layers of clothes, it only stopped his descent; it didn’t tell him where to go from here.

Something grabbed his calf in an iron hold and he felt himself hauled in a direction – dazed, he thought of Daine’s lecture to Constant and realised what she’d meant, because it felt like his limb was being dislocated. But it told him what he needed to know, and he battled too to follow that pull, popping out of the snow to a hand grabbing him by the hair, which he hollered at even as he sucked in greedy gulps of air. Nonny had grabbed him and pulled him up, releasing their hold on him without warning before he could grab the boards.

He sunk again with a yell, his Gift just about lashing out. He didn’t know if it had been on purpose or not, having had only a glimpse of Nonny’s awkward grip on the wood before he’d been let go. Still, he was closer to safety now than he had been, if he didn’t accidently slide back into the pocket of air that had almost claimed him.

He flailed upright, boots finding purchase on something, and surfaced so fast he almost brained himself on the wood. Earnest was giving shrill screams of barks, absolutely beside himself with panic. And another hand caught Numair’s shoulder, hauling him up onto the boards.

Numair was sodden now, all his strength fading. He briefly felt a rush of energy hit as he rolled away from his saviour, nervous of Nonny – but Nonny was gone. Savigny crouched over him, blurred by the falling snow and the shadowed edges of dark. As Numair relaxed with relief, the wind picked up; he was drenched now and, he knew, in danger. Though his body was exhausted, his Gift was not; he had too much in reserve to try dry himself without fear of setting himself on fire, or sinking them straight through the snow to a boggy and undignified death.

Shaking so hard he was shuddering the boards, Numair accepted a hot flask from Savigny, who was knocking snow from him. If he was talking, Numair couldn’t hear it or see it, his eyes iced over. He gulped the hot drink down with a whine of pain at the delicious heat of it – some kind of bitter tea – and then dribbled some on his glove to touch to his eyes, melting the ice so he could wipe them clear. It didn’t help much. As soon as he had them clear, more snow whipped back into them.

“I’m done,” he admitted hoarsely to Savigny, barely able to stagger upright. Earnest was still barking and snarling, worked up beyond belief. And there was blood running down Numair’s leg from a cut in his calf he hadn’t seen happen. “I’ve got to go in.”

If Savigny answered, Numair couldn’t hear him. He just stooped to move the woman’s body to a stretcher he’d brought with him, gesturing for Numair to take the other side as they stumbled back towards the wall.

There was no accurate count of how many living survivors had been found and hurried away, out of the cold. Numair knew that they took thirty-seven back to the estate with them, which was a gruelling ride as he was tireder than he’d ever been. His mood was acrimonious, a headache building behind his eyes sharpening his every comment into a blade. Constant had to haul Earnest away, who still hadn’t stopped barking, when Numair threatened to throw him over the wall. After that, everyone gave Numair plenty of space, leaving him to prop himself sulkily into a cart and refuse to help move the dead.

Savigny found him there as the cart pulled up outside the estate and into the relative shelter of the walls. At least here, they could hear each other speak. George was slightly behind him.

“Are you hurt?” was Savigny’s greeting, looking up at him and frowning. “Constant says you’ve been sat there for hours now. In wet clothes? You must be uncomfortable.”

Numair was especially irritated at Savigny, who he somehow felt must be at fault for this. If not the snowfall, perhaps the fact that Numair was here at all, and perhaps especially for Nonny.

To prove he wasn’t useless, he swung himself out of the cart – he meant for it to be smooth and easy but found that he _had_ stiffened quite horribly – and staggered his way to the doors, refusing to speak to the man. Savigny, startled, followed. As did George, even though there was work to be done. Numair ignored them.

The kitchens, shockingly, were empty. They were rarely empty these days, but Numair assumed all the staff were down helping settled the injured into their beds and see to their wounds. He hunched by the hearth and closed his eyes, exhausted beyond reason. He felt so tired he was silly with it, like if he had to get up and move he might scream.

“Numair,” came George’s soft voice. Numair ignored him. “Numair, look at me. That’s an order.”

Begrudgingly, Numair did so. Time must have passed while he’d hunkered there, as they’d gathered an audience of Elspeth and Constant. It was Savigny who had a towel to dry him who came the closest, settling on his heels to try ruffle the towel through Numair’s dripping hair.

“Leave me,” snapped Numair, jerking away. His voice sounded horrendous, coarse and dry. His throat and mouthed burned like he hadn’t had water in years. “Haven’t you done enough today, letting me flurry around in the snow before finally deciding to help? I’m tired of your fussing.”

“I haven’t seen you all day,” said Savigny with a scowl. “Well, if you’re going to be like that. We’ve work to be done.”

Numair’s heart began racing. Had he upset him? Hadn’t he wanted to upset him? He wasn’t sure now, and he went to stand to try apologise and found that he couldn’t. He had no balance. And the room was too hot, his heart too fast, and Savigny had stood up and was turning away.

Someone’s foot scuffed to the side of Numair and he swayed around, finding Pech standing there watching him, eyes narrowed.

“Lordy, look at your pupils,” murmured Pech, voice so soft no one but Numair and perhaps George heard. “What have you taken?”

Numair blinked. “No,” he said uncertainly, looking from Pech to Savigny, who’d stopped for some reason and was now looking once more at him. “I don’t take poppy. I can’t control my Gift on poppy. Savigny?”

Savigny now looked well and truly alarmed, as did George.

“Do you have high-heat charcoal?” asked George, coming fast to Numair and prodding at him, infuriating Numair beyond reason. But, though Numair tried to shove him off, he was as weak as a kitten, and could only swat gently as the man felt his throat and, for some reason, slipped his hand under Numair’s shirt to feel the skin below his armpit. “Get it, now. Numair, what have you eaten today?”

Numair had bigger problems. It was too hot. He wanted to be colder, and his Gift – unruly, confused, and sliding rapidly out of his careful control – was trying to make it so. Savigny looked down at their feet, eyes widening with alarm as he saw the two-toned Gift beginning to spill out of Numair, tendrils of ice cracking up the stove to grab at and suffocate the fire.

George shook him, hard, Numair barely managing to refocus on him.

“Tell me what you’ve eaten, lad,” snapped George, sounding furious now. “Don’t make me get Alanna here to slap you silly for refusing to help the healer.”

“I’d never,” slurred Numair. His tongue had gone funny. Had he eaten anything? He didn’t think so. He closed his eyes.

He opened them to panic. Someone had carried him out of the kitchens and the air was frigid, people yelling. Savigny was glowing with his lovely Gift, trying to bring heat back, and Daine was chattering something about Earnest. George was holding Numair’s head, trying to force something gritty and awful into his mouth. Numair was more worried about the strange feeling he had settling over him. Everyone around him was suddenly a stranger even though he knew them, their faces unfamiliar, their expressions monstrous, and Numair whimpered and tried to twist away even as he felt something in him break apart from his body and the feeling crashed down like a wave –

Constant felt the building shudder, a brief lull in the chatter following it. Everyone looked up, nervously, as dust fell from the ceiling. Someone gasped as the ice Numair had been calling abruptly melted.

“Is he unconscious?” Constant asked, pushing past a servant to come to where George was trying to make Numair swallow the charcoal Pech had given him out of his box, which he’d run and fetched. George just shook his head, expression grim, as Numair’s eyes were open but focused on nothing. Constant, horrified, whispered, “Is he dead?”

Savigny made a noise like a sob.

Constant couldn’t bear to look at him.

That was when the fitting started. Constant realised he too was crying with panic watching his friend convulse, Daine shrieking at Sav to _listen to me_ but Sav well beyond attending. George and Pech were the only ones not panicking, except for Elspeth who strode over and grabbed Daine by the arm, hauling her away to sit in a chair and, “Tell me calmly, that’s a good girl.” Pech just quietly waited out the first fit before using his knife on Numair’s arm and beginning to test it against the roots in his box just as he had Savigny, all those months ago.

Poison, Constant realised. He was testing for poison. It wasn’t a long test either, as the knife almost immediately reacted against a packet of leaves and berries.

Pech gritted his teeth. “Belladonna,” he said to George.

“Nightshade?” Sav shrilled, his voice cracking horribly. “Who’d give him _nightshade?_ ”

“That’s better than it could be,” was George’s grim response. “Daine, Numair said you’ve a fondness for herbs. Do you have any jaborandi? It’s a foreign plant but popular with herbalists, as it’s good against belladonna poisonings.”

“No,” said Daine, Savigny suddenly coming to life and looking at her. “I’ve never even heard of it.”

“I didn’t think you would have,” hissed George, closing his eyes and thinking. “It takes some fancy growing, it being from the Copper Isles.”

“What did you say?” Savigny asked Daine, his voice odd. “Before, when you were yelling. What did you say?”

Numair, who’d been lying still and barely conscious throughout this, shuddered into another horrible fit. There was foam building in his mouth and George was hard-pressed to keep his mouth clear while not wrenching his head.

“Earnest says Numair fell into the snow and a man with Sav’s face but not his smell pulled him out and gave him water,” Daine repeated unhappily. “He tried to bark but Numair didn’t understand. Is that who poisoned him?”

Savigny had gone a horrible colour. Constant looked at him and knew Sav knew who’d done this. But there was no time to confront him.

“Pech?” Constant asked, desperate. But Pech shook his head too.

“I’ll have to go,” said George. “I’ve a friend in the city, a healer. She keeps the leaves dried with her. Someone come here – you’ll need to keep him from choking while I look for my friend. If we can keep him alive until he purges it, he’ll recover fully.”

“You’ll want him unconscious too,” Pech said suddenly. They looked at him. “Ah, it’s much as like I warned him when dear Marquis Savigny was dosed with mandrake. Belladonna is mandrake’s nastier cousin, still a nightshade but meaner and harder to predict the course of. He’ll be delirious, and we’ve seen that he has no control of his magic when he’s delirious. I’ve no desire to be turned into a lordsicle, though I recognise I speak only for myself.”

Constant was barely attending by this point. Numair needed a healer, and there was only one healer Constant knew of in the city. One who happened to, as Constant also knew, work very closely with her partner, who grew exotic plants.

He turned to Daine.

“Don’t let George leave,” he said to her, ignoring Elspeth’s look of horror. “It’s fit to blizzard out there again and the ice tunnels are down. He’ll never make it – he doesn’t know the way and the snow will be too deep. He’ll die.”

“What are you going to do?” hissed Daine, rigid with fear.

Constant grabbed his outer coat, hesitating a moment before picking up someone’s scarf too. “The roofs,” he said, turning and running for the door without looking back.

The roofs didn’t get him the whole way there. Constant had no idea how he didn’t break every single one of his ankles and then some on the mad leaps across where the shake had knocked down the boards people set up to allowed easy access. The noble estates, of course, did nothing of the sort, but it was doable to get through almost the entire Jewel just by using shops and smaller houses. Without the boards, though, he had to jump, and the slates were slick and icy, designed to shed snow but still gruesome in the below-freezing temperatures.

But, for a while, he made good progress. As warmly bundled as he was, and while constantly moving, he knew he was in no danger of freezing, and it would take more than a blizzard to get him lost in his own city.

Then the roofs ran out as he got closer to the sprawling estates on the edge of the Jewel, those that belonged to the real old blood, like the Silvains. He had to climb down into the snow, which was up to his chest, and shove his way there. All the time, more snow was falling, and it was getting colder, and he was moving so slowly while expending so much energy.

It became a case of one foot after the other, shoving and digging frantically. Inch by inch, he crept along, all the time knowing that Numair could be dying behind him. He didn’t let himself linger on the thought of who might have poisoned him, or why, or what it meant for them; he just kept going. At one point, he slipped and fell face first into the snow. That was when he began to shiver, snow finding every tiny gap in his clothing to slink in and melt against his skin. He began to doubt he’d make it as the snow flurried harder and the wind howled and the darkness crept up; he had a nasty, horrible thought that if Numair died, Daine wouldn’t leave.

So horrified by that thought he was that he stopped and tipped his head back, staring up at the sky that was trying to kill him. And he saw the sky flames up there, writhing and proud, that the Gallans had put there to light the way. The flames that were the reason he could see at all. Numair loved those flames so much. And he looked down, blinked snow from his eyes, focused on the Silvain star high above their home, and charged towards it.

The snow muffled sound so ferociously that Constant didn’t realise he was being chased until his pursuer was upon him, suddenly pitching forward into the snow once more as a weight slammed against him. He stumbled up with a holler – and found Earnest wiggling out of the snow, panting fit to burst. No Bon Bon, thankfully, who’d have never made it through this snow. But Earnest, who was more fur than sense and who had wide feet with fluffy toes designed to help him run along the top of the snow instead of drowning in it, stood with his legs splayed and smiled doggily down at Constant, so proud that he’d found him.

“I’m never letting Sav call you dumb again,” Constant said to his dog, reaching up to wrap his arm around the dog’s neck in an awkward hug. “We’ve got to go see Eloise. Do you understand, Eloise?”

Earnest barked and turned, leading Constant in the direction they needed to go. Constant kept a tight hold on him, grateful for his warmth and companionship.

“I need to buy you a bigger sled,” he said to Earnest, who wagged his tail happily.

Eloise wasn’t pleased by Constant’s determination to go back out there as they waited for Ritsuko and her partner, Beka, to get ready. “You’re already wet,” she said worriedly, watching him steaming beside the fire. “I’ve no sled to hitch your hound to, and no sled-pullers of my own. Maybe a carriage …”

“No carriage would make it through that,” said Constant, looking outside.

“Snow shoes then,” said Eloise firmly. “I can’t believe you didn’t wear any to begin with.”

“We’ve only got to make it past the square,” Constant argued back. “Then we’ll take to the roofs and they’ll just slow us down. We can’t be _slow_ , Eloise, this is Numair!”

The healer and her partner arrived then, bundled up so thickly all that was visible of them was their eyes. And it was time to return to the snow, Constant walking away from the fire without letting himself think about it lest he lose his courage.

“I don’t like it,” said Eloise again as she followed them to the door. “Maybe I should come with you …”

Constant turned and kissed her on her cheek, seeing her flush prettily with surprise. “I’ll be fine,” he promised her with a smile. “We’ll have our home of hounds and hawks yet.”

It had been something he’d enjoyed a lot recently, coming to be closer with the woman he knew he’d marry one day, even if he knew that what was there was a deep respect for each other and a firm desire for a powerful friendship instead of a romance. In some ways, he was gladder for this basis for their future marriage, which Don had validated some months before and which was set to occur when Constant turned eighteen, to allow him time to adjust to his holdings before having the Silvain estates added to them. It seemed far more stable than the love between Don and Savigny, which was passionate but tempestuous, or even the love between Numair and Savigny which was comfortable and quiet but had faded gently without any reason Constant could see.

“Just be careful, Constant,” said Eloise, crouching to pat Earnest. “Winter wants us to underestimate it.”

“I would never underestimate it,” he promised.

Then he led the way out into the wild night, his hound at his side and his laden companions struggling behind.

If he was sorely honest, Constant knew it wasn’t his courage or his winter smarts that got them home alive that day. It was a full white-out before they made it across the square, the kind of white-out that hid even the winterlights from sight. Even Earnest struggled to figure out where he was going, and Constant knew they were in terrible danger of circling until they died of exposure in the middle of their city. The wind was so strong it was almost pushing them over, battering them so viciously with ice that it began to penetrate their waterproofed layer with dangerous fingers of wet.

It wasn’t anything Constant did that saved them; it was all Rum.

Constant stumbled, almost vanishing below the snow, but Ritsuko yanked him out. They’d roped themselves together so she felt him go down and reacted, but not quickly enough to stop him getting a face full of cold. He was beginning to feel slow and stupid, his shivering slowing to occasional fitful bursts. He, after all, had already made this journey once; he was already cold when he’d led them out in it again.

“Come on,” she shrieked at him over the wind as he stood there and trembled dumbly at her. Constant knew she could make heat with her Gift, but not very effectively, and not enough to keep all three of them warm, but he wished she’d risk it. “Move, you fool, you idiot! If you give up, he dies!”

Constant also knew she was berating him to try and get him angry enough to get moving again, but he wasn’t very good at getting angry. Still, he tried to help, thinking of Daine leaving and someone poisoning Numair and Savigny treating him like a child and Cole hurting Savigny. But it all felt very far away, even as Earnest grabbed his hand and bit down, pulling on him. He took a few stumbling steps after Earnest and stopped, feeling his shivering stop too.

Uh oh, a distant part of his brain thought.

They hadn’t even made it to the buildings.

Something clattered overhead, all of them ducking as a bronze bird crashed out of the sky. Rum looked furious, his metal feathers heavy with ice and snow as he screeched with a sound like an iron foundry, all clangs and clashes and sizzling steel. And he landed heavily on Constant’s shoulder and bit him on the ear.

His beak was sharp and Rum had very concept of ‘restraint’. Constant shrieked at the pain, already feeling blood running down his neck. But Rum didn’t apologise, just battered Constant’s mind with rage at the idea that Constant wasn’t going to fight _this_ enemy, and screeched again so loud Constant’s brain vibrated with it.

“I can’t fight _winter_ you unholy bird!” Constant roared at the creature, who clacked.

 _I would_ , the bird seemed to be thinking, eyes glittering dangerously. _There’s not a thing I wouldn’t fight_.

That was true. Constant doubted there was anything Rum wouldn’t battle, including seasons or gods. It didn’t seem to matter if he won or not, just that he tried in the first place.

More awake now his ear was a burning coil of pain, he gritted his teeth, found his feet, and stamped onwards, Rum screeching every time he drifted off track again.

They stumbled into the estate, an army of hands waiting to strip wet clothes from them and wrap them in warmed towels. Constant was barely conscious to feel them or know what was happening as he was passed from hands to hands until he fetched up in Elspeth’s, who lectured him about how foolish he was.

But, though his manic exhaustion and the cold which had frozen him right to his bones, Constant still grinned at her as she patted at his ear with a clean rag. “I fought winter,” he said proudly. “And I _won_. Is Numair okay?”

And then he toppled forward onto the ground and went blessedly to sleep.


	43. The Burning of Cría

Constant got sick. He should have known this was coming. No one fought winter and came out laughing, not even a Hartholm. The fever crashed down on him while he slept and he woke up sweating and babbling, shoved into another bed beside Numair’s sickbed as his body rebelled against his treatment of it. Ritsuko said he had winter-fever, where the body got too cold and started shutting down. Now he was warm again but his body had gone too far. The balances were out.

Constant knew none of this. He’d gone straight from cognizant to delirium, fetched up somewhere in his mind near where Numair had when he’d first come to them with bad lungs and a horrible cough. All he knew was heat and shadows, opening his eyes to strange thoughts and images; no one familiar was with him and he was scared, and hurting, and drowning in it.

Sometimes, he vaguely knew where he was. He’d open his eyes and see Numair peering at him from across the gap between their beds, or Savigny would be looming somewhere close. But their faces were wrong and there was a smell of burning and Constant would cry out because he didn’t have the liquid left to cry for real, and he was scared of missing them.

His life began to pass in honeyed snippets of time.

He’d blink and there was Savigny, his brother, kneeled beside the bed with his head bowed in prayer. Constant knew then that he was hallucinating; the Gift, like the King, kneeled for no one, especially not foolish young lords who thought they knew better than winter. But if he was seeing truly, he sent a prayer of his own to whoever Savigny was calling for; please answer him, he implored, his faith won’t survive otherwise.

A blink.

Don now, swaddled up against the cold and with snow on his shoulders. Constant felt Don’s hand cold on his forehead and opened his eyes, horrified when he saw how worried and tired Don looked. You can’t, he wanted to protest. You can’t worry about me – you have to protect _yourself_. But he had no voice and no words and all he could do was watch as Don turned away to wrap Savigny into his arms, Savigny kissing him as though they’d never parted.

Constant wished that was true sight and not a delirium.

He didn’t want Savigny to be alone.

Another blink and someone was holding him; was he a child again? An infante? He must be because he knew these arms as his mother’s, and he gasped with the pain of knowing he must have fallen over the line if his dead mother was here to rock him gently like he was a babe again. Her embrace was soft and firm and now he found his tears, thinking of never knowing if Numair was alive and Daine left in Galla over a row of noble graves and Savigny’s prayers unanswered as Don spiralled slowly into a madness no one but Constant knew how to help him negotiate. 

But he was warm and loved and held and, just for a moment, Constant let himself be all these things. It had been so long. He hadn’t had a mother since he was eight, and maybe even before. The former Marquis of Hartholm, his mother, had never been soft or warm. He thought, for a moment, it was Daine, and was desperate to tell her that he hadn’t meant it; he didn’t _want_ Numair to die and Daine to stay, even if he’d miss her. He wanted her to live! He wanted her to see the world and every animal and come back and tell him all about them; he wanted her to feel like there was no cages around her, not ever; he wanted her to be as happy as any human had ever been or ever would be again.

He opened his eyes and looked up.

“Elspeth,” he croaked.

“There, lad,” she said, brushing hair back from his sweaty skin. Somehow, in the short time since he’d been ill, she’d aged. Her eyes were so hollow now, so hurt. The lines on her face deeper than ever. She looked as though grief had taken up a chisel and carved her out of marble, and just as he thought this he realised he could see those she’d lost over her shoulder: Adel, Bette, the lost nobles.

He began to tremble.

“No, no,” she soothed, cool lips to his skin. He drifted in her arms. “You’re not so far gone yet, no matter how much your brother’s hysteria is scaring you. It’s a middling fever. You’ll break it.”

“Numair,” he mumbled, barely finding his tongue. “Is Numair alive?”

There was a rustle of bedding, Constant turning his head – Elspeth was in the bed with him, cradling him like he was her own gosse – and finding Numair sitting up in his own. Unlike Elspeth, he looked vastly better than he had the last time Constant had seen him.

“Nothing keeps me down for long,” he said with his warmest, brightest smile. “Don’t worry, Constant – I’ll be here next to you until you’re through, I promise. Ritsuko thinks you’ll burn through it tonight or tomorrow.”

“That’s good,” Constant managed. “I’m glad you’re not leaving Daine behind.”

He slept again.

Conversations drifted down to the hot dark place where Constant was lingering behind his closed eyes. Don talking about the palace hawks and how savage they’d been since he’d taken ill; Daine battling to stop Rum from shredding the room and her; the dogs whining and nosing at him as they leapt onto the bed and tunnelled into his covers. Ritsuko talking about how he was almost at the peak now, soon soon soon. And Numair, Numair chatting about magic and hawks and all the clever things wild magic could do, promising to make sure Constant knew exactly how to ride with a hawk and see the world, if he wished.

With a rush, the worst night was upon them.

Constant woke with a gasp, burning for air. The room was dark. The dogs watching him with their eyes worried and their ears sharp. Numair slept.

“Savigny!” cried Constant, heart liable to snap in two. He was desperate, he smelled blood, fire, steel; was his brother even still alive or had Constant slept past the death of him? “Sav –”

“Shh, shh,” breathed Savigny, reeling up out of a chair where he’d been dozing. He came to Constant and slid into the bed, a sodden cloth in his hand which he used to drip water onto Constant’s swollen tongue. Constant gulped like he was starved for it and then began to cry because it wasn’t enough, though all he could manage were dry, hoarse gasps instead of sobs. “I’m here. Do you need the healer?”

“Why hasn’t the healer burned it out of him yet?” came an unhappy voice from the dark. Constant looked and saw that Savigny had been sharing his chair with Don, both of them wrapped in a blanket together. “He can’t keep fighting it like this. I’m going to speak with her –”

“She has a house of people needing healing, prince,” was Sav’s quiet response, his hands gentle on Constant’s throat as he felt either side and then began to wipe his skin with the cloth, so gloriously cold Constant could howl. “She’s exhausted from fixing what the poison did to Numair, let alone the Bog victims and Constant. Should I ask her to prioritise him because he’s my brother, or a noble, or the Hartholm heir? Or because I love him most?”

“He’s important,” whispered Don.

Sav leaned his head against Constant’s, lips warm against Constant’s skin.

“So is everyone,” he whispered, so soft Constant doubted Don heard. “I’m so sorry, Constant. I can’t put you above everyone, even though you are the most important in my world.”

“It’s okay,” slurred Constant dazedly, reaching for Sav’s hand and finding Don’s instead. He smiled at them, feeling his heart beat slower with love for the two men who watched over him so. How could he ever have thought they’d never find their way again? They always would. They loved too much not to. “I’m younger and stronger than Numair. I don’t need healing as much as he does.”

Both men laughed, Don glancing to the other bed with a small frown. Constant didn’t like that frown. Wasn’t Numair getting better?

“I love you too,” was what Constant said instead of worrying them with his thoughts, seeing Sav blink through blurry eyes and Don laying a hand on his shoulder. “I love you _both_.”

And then he dived into his fever, knowing it was tonight he’d come out the other side or die trying.

His dreams were wild, and he was sorry he likely wouldn’t remember them when – if – he woke. He dreamed of Daine dancing with the wolves and Savigny burning the sky. He dreamed of his parents looking for him and him running into the depths of the destroyed wing of their home to home. He dreamed of storms of snow and ice and thunder that Numair raised his arms against and threw back into the boiling sky. He dreamed, once, of tossing and turning himself awake and leaning over the side of the bed to vomit spit and bile, only to look up and realise Numair was awake and there was a badger sitting on the bed with him. A badger bigger than any Constant had ever seen, with silver claws and a frightening stare.

 _\- This kit sees me -_ said the badger, Constant goggling.

“Can you heal him?” asked Numair. “I’ve done all you asked and more. Surely you can gift the boy with more life? He’s done nothing but love your animal kin his whole life. A more devoted disciple you’ll never find.”

 _\- I cannot and you know it. Mortals’ fight with mortality is beyond me to meddle with. –_ But the badger kept watching Constant, his eyes strange in the firelight. _\- I wonder how many mothers ago Weiryn crossed this one’s path, though. He glows like my kit does. –_

Numair’s surprise was audible. “He’s a child of Weiryn’s? Like Daine?”

_\- Many many mothers ago, yes. You say he carries a bronze hawk? They’re Weiryn’s Hunters, those that give their feathers for his arrow-tips and which contain the nature of the wild to fight that which would constrain it. No one without his blood could handle one, even if that blood is diluted by the passage of time. Still, I cannot heal him. Were you not listening when I said the Divine Realms have split over this silly mortal squabble? This place, mage, these people – all the gods are watching. There are at least two god-touched running around this land, and even that ridiculous trickster, Kyprioth, has pushed his way in. Jihuk and the Hag have parted ways over her extending her reach here, and Weiryn has been forced to seek the help of the beast-gods of Carthak, the siblings, to fend her off. They’re unwilling to help him though. They say he has abandoned his People in favour of the squabbles of humans, leaving the beasts to be beaten and whipped in his great winters. A Huntsmen, they say, cannot stay in the woods when the woods are giving way to cities and towns. Unless he finds a way to soothe them, they’ll be no help, and the Hag has turned the Mother’s eye, and her Hand, back to Carthak. –_

Numair was quiet.

Then, “What’s going to happen to the Gallans? If there is a shift in power.”

_– I don’t need to answer that. You know. What happened to the Raka, to the Bazhir? Pah. Human wars. Who suffers in the end? Everyone. I’ve given you my warning. I won’t be able to return until this is done, though I’ll do my best to see that you’re given what you need to keep my kit safe. Get her out of this place, and all others you wouldn’t see buried. This battle is beyond even you, long nose. And here.”_

Constant heard the sound of chewing and, through blurry eyes, saw the badger hand something that glittered with silver to Numair, who took it with awed hands.

_\- When this is done, that will let me find you. Now, **run**. – _

And the badger was gone.

“Can I see?” mumbled Constant, reaching for the silver glitter. Numair startled, obviously having forgotten he was there. “It’s so pretty.”

“I didn’t realise you were fully awake.” Still, Numair slid out of bed and – after pausing on the edge to breath heavily, bowed down the middle, he hobbled his way over to Constant’s bed to give him the silver claw, which Constant gripped tight in his hand, enjoyed the warmth of it against his palm. “How much did you understand?”

Constant tried to sift through his fuzzy brain.

“A badger …?” he tried, but the memories were already scrambled. “Can I hold this?”

Numair nodded, dark eyes

Constant smiled at him, or tried to, But he knew he was going again.

“Numair,” he breathed, seeing his friend lean closer to catch what he was saying, “Will you stay with me?”

“Oh, Constant. Of course. I won’t leave you. You’re safe with me.”

Constant clung to the hand Numair offered. This time, when he slept, he slept peacefully, and he dreamed of Weiryn fighting for his land and his people – all of them, human and beast alike – keeping the sands of Carthak from consuming them.

Constant woke hungry. He opened his eyes and levered himself upright, startled as this caused a small cascade of trinkets to fall from his chest and into the bedding. When he dug them out, he found the oddest mix of things: a silver badger claw he’d never seen before, Earnest’s favourite leather chew-ball, Bon Bon’s fanciest ribbons, a collection of Rum’s best stolen buttons, the glove Don had given him for his last birthday, the book of mammals Numair had brought with him, small statues of animals Adel had given him one birthday, and a locket that, when he levered it open, contained a tiny copy of the Sav, Don, Daine and baby Constant painting on one side, and on the other a perfect painting of Daine and Numair sitting with Constant’s dogs on their laps. There were other things, but this took Constant’s breath away, this locket. He stared at it until someone made a sound, then he looked up and realised he was in the midst of a mess of sleeping bodies. Savigny curled on the end of his bed like a cat, almost awake but not quite. Don seated beside the bed on a chair but his head having toppled forward as he’d slept so he was now facedown in the bedding. Elspeth in another chair; Ritsuko asleep on the hearth by the fire. Numair was awake with Daine curled in the bed with him, though her eyes were open and she was watching Constant with aching hope in them. Numair held a book and, though he was watching Constant, he didn’t look as well as he’d looked in Constant’s dreams.

“How did I get poisoned and you still look worse than I do?” was the first thing someone said to Constant, Numair grinning as he said it. The grin wasn’t comforting either. Constant frowned at him; why was he such a grey colour?

“Are you conscious?” asked Daine.

“Yeah,” said Constant. “I’m _starving._ Am I allowed to eat?”

But she didn’t answer; her shout of excitement as she launched from Numair’s bed to his and wrapped him in a hug drowned out any answer he might have gotten, and successfully woke everyone else up. Suddenly, Constant was the centre of attention, everyone talking at once and Ritsuko yelling at them to give him _space_.

“Was it that close?” Constant asked Savigny as soon as he had a moment with his brother after the fuss died down, gesturing to the trinkets. It was a superstition, that to call someone back from death, you could remind them of all that loved them by surrounding them by their earthly tethers. He wondered who had suggested it.

Savigny didn’t answer at first, just pulled a face which Constant thought might have been a garish attempt at a light-hearted grin.

“Put it this way,” was Savigny’s eventual response, “don’t do that to me again, ever. Got it?”

“Got it,” promised Constant.

Constant had lost four days to the illness. It took another two until he was out of bed and walking around the estate, though always with his hounds watching his every move and people everywhere he turned, as though they were worried as soon as they lost sight of him, he’d relapse. After he’d seen himself in a mirror and realised how much weight he’d shed so fast, he no longer blamed them for that. It must have been frightening for them to watch him sicken like that. He’d mostly slept through it.

He discovered that Numair had made a full recovery three days into his illness, though he hadn’t shaken the lethargy that had kept him close to his bed. This was good news except that, unfortunately, the good news ended there. The poison, as both Pech and Ritsuko told George firmly, would be fully purged by now. Numair should be on the mend, if not already there. But, for some reason, he wasn’t. He was lingering at the gates of wellness but, as the days passed, Constant was sure that, in subtle ways, Numair was actually getting … well, not _worse_. But tireder. Slower. He slept so much now, and he hadn’t gotten his colour back.

“What if there was something else in the poison?” he asked Pech, who scowled. “Did you check against everything just in case?”

“Yes, of course,” snapped Pech.

But he got his knife and checked again anyway, finding nothing. Numair slept.

Ritsuko checked too for anything she might have missed, though she barely had any Gift left to spare by this point. She was as grey as Numair, having almost seared through all her reserves helping Constant fight his fever off on top of several nasty infections the people who’d been snow-buried had picked up. Constant was nervous about how tired she looked, especially when he overheard George talking quietly with Savigny about the need to locate another healer. But there were so few, and the blizzard had kept up for two days, and if it had been dangerous when Constant had dashed to the Silvain’s for a healer, now venturing outside for too long was certain death.

Still, when Numair was awake, he was out of bed and acting as normal, reading or lecturing or flirting, with occasional breaks to annoy George. So Constant put his worries aside. Numair was old, after all. Of course it took him longer to recover.

On the ninth day past the poisoning, Constant woke to a spinny feeling in his brain. It was familiar, and Rum – who was hunkered on a metal perch in his room – was hissing. Constant soothed him quickly, missing Pippy who was back at the palace, and ran downstairs to see what his magic was picking up. He knew now that this feeling was his magic, as it had been when he’d sensed the griffins or, before that, he suspected he’d also felt the Stormwings. He went straight for Daine, who was pressed to the glass of her bedroom windows, peering up at the stormy sky worriedly. Don had made a break for the palace three days before and Savigny assured them he’d made it; still, they couldn’t help but worry.

“Do you feel that?” asked Constant, earning a nod from Daine. “What is it?”

“Something in the sky, I think,” was Daine’s response, though she was frowning. “Or … below? Not below. I don’t think it’s below, but something tickles badly.”

Constant went up to her and looked out too, feeling the same metal-badness of a year before. Like carrion and steel and oil.

“Stormwings, I think,” he said. He knew his magic better than he had now, and Daine didn’t question him. “After Numair?”

“I don’t know how they’d know he was here,” Daine answered.

Someone had come in behind them, Constant turning to find Savigny crossing the room. Numair was behind him, leaning on the doorframe and giving Daine a silly grin when he saw her.

“We feel Stormwings, we think,” Constant said to them, Sav frowning. “Not close, just … somewhere.”

“I, for one, don’t like knowing that there are Stormwings even somewhere,” quipped Numair. He hobbled over to the wind, Constant dismayed to realise that even that short burst of exertion had him panting. “Anyway, I’m not surprised. Where there’s Ozorne, there’s Stormwings, I figure. He had them lurking at Sinthya to chase me here, nasty things. There’s not much point worrying about them.”

Daine turned on Numair, probably because she too could hear him wheezing.

“Have you eaten?” she accused him, veering around Constant and going to poke her finger into Numair’s bony chest. “You’re as bad as looking after yourself as Don, I swear. Kitchens, now – go on, move. We’re feeding you and sitting you down before you topple, you great big silly thing.”

“Yes, mother,” said Numair, letting himself be prodded away with a mournful air.

This left Constant and Sav. Sav didn’t bring up Numair, or the Stormwings, so Constant let them rest; instead, he reached into his pocket and fetched out the locket.

Sav glanced at it, embarrassment pinching the bridge of his nose.

“I know you bought me this,” Constant accused with no small amount of affection. “I found your standard etched on the back. What’s it for?”

“A Midwinter gift,” said Savigny, still pinched. Constant knew he was blushing, because he recognised the expression from himself. “I wanted to celebrate Midwinter, since we may not have Daine here come Beltane. Or Numair.”

“Oh.” Constant looked at the locket, his heart thudding about in his chest. “I’ve never had a Midwinter. That sounds really nice. Very Tortallan.”

“Well, we’d best get used to being Tortallan, if we’re to visit Daine,” teased Savigny.

For a brief second, Constant felt a rush of alarm, of panic, the faded memory of a badger telling Numair to run – but then it was gone. He shook off the feeling and grinned back at his brother, holding the locket out.

“Take it back, then,” he declared, Sav’s eyebrows up. “I want it _for_ Midwinter proper, then. Wrapped and everything. And I’ll never love another gift more, except for my dogs, of course.”

Savigny laughed, but he took the locket back and tucked it into his pocket. Constant, who’d spent every spare minute gazing at the little portraits within, felt something twinge in his chest as he saw it go. He wanted it back as soon as he’d given it away. But Midwinter wasn’t so far, and he knew he’d never be parted with it once it was around his neck once more.

Distraction came in the form of George, who arrived looking tense despite the bright scarf he was wearing somewhat ruining his fierce expression. “I’ve got a bad feeling,” was the first thing George said, not even seeming to realise Constant was there as Savigny tensed. “These wards of yours and Numair’s, how deep do they go?”

“Deep enough,” was Savigny’s response. “They go over the whole estate too, to stop anyone coming in over the top. Why?”

“I’m seeing snippets of a Gift that isn’t one of ours around,” George answered grimly. “I think someone’s here, snooping about. Are you sure they’re impenetrable?”

“Numair shaped them –” Savigny began.

A person stepped out from beside the window, two sword lengths away from Savigny. A person in mottled clothing, their face featureless, their breathing rapid.

There was a brief silence, and then both George and Savigny went for the person, George with two daggers and Savigny with a sword Constant hadn’t realised he was wearing. Earnest burst into the room shrieking his barks, and Bon Bon wasn’t far behind.

“No!” cried the person, dropping to their knees as Sav’s sword slashed over their heads. They cowered like a kicked dog, holding their hands up to Sav in surrender. “Please! No harm, no harm!”

“Sav, no!” yelled Constant, grabbing his brother’s arm before Sav could strike again. George wheeled back, face alight with rage. “He – she – they’re surrendering! Don’t!”

“I should strike you down here, traitor,” snarled Savigny, expression alien as they looked on the person. “You _dare_ threaten my house!”

“It wasn’t done on purpose,” snivelled the person, sagging onto the floor. Too late, Constant realised they were bleeding and started forward, but Savigny’s hand lashed around his arm and held him back. “I didn’t mean to hurt the mage. I wouldn’t hurt the mage, not your heart, not your heart, love. Never would Nonny shed heart’s blood, never.”

“Why are you here, Nonsense?” said George coldly, Nonny turning eyes of pure horror onto the man. “Yes, I see you. You know me.”

“The Whisper Man, in Galla,” gasped this Nonsense, this Nonny. “No, no. You mustn’t aspire to the whims of the Whisper Man. He’ll cut the babes, burn the nest. Tortall’s lying tongue slithers into the nether of maiden Galla, no fair. Her maidenhood! Her purity! And the Bottle, it’s burning. Did the Whisper Man burn it, slay Remy, kill the people? Did he?”

Savigny inhaled. “The Bottle burns?” he breathed. “Stop yammering in riddles and speak – what’s happened?”

Nonny slid a hand into their jerkin and withdrew it, smiling blankly at the blood that dripped from their fingers. “The Rogue,” they lisped, eyes almost rolling back. They were fiendishly hurt. “The Rogue strikes the Raven’s unprotected nest in the dead, the death, of winter.”

“Raven?” Constant repeated, perking up. The rebel mage, the one who’d tried to kill Don and Nora? What did Savigny know of her?

“Remy’s dead?” Sav whispered.

“As a doorknob, a nail,” said Nonny, Savigny flinching. “Run right through. Oh woe, if the mage hadn’t turned my mistress’s eye, woe! We’d be safe now!”

“I don’t trust this a whit,” said George coldly. “She’s a liar. Give her to me and I’ll finish what she began in Tortall, and don’t go where she’s leading.”

“You can’t kill … her,” Constant protested, tripping a little on the her. Nonny slid a glance at him as he spoke and smiled, unkindly. He stepped back. “She surrendered. That’s murder.”

“Kill me if you must, adored one,” breathed Nonny, bowing so close to the floor that her forehead almost brushed Savigny’s shoes. “I would die blissfully on your sword.”

Sav frowned, pulling his shoe back and looking extremely uncomfortable.

“But,” continued Nonny – and Constant saw a glance slip up, her colourless eyes examining Savigny’s expression before dashing back to the ground – “Don’t let the Bottle burn for my overzealousness in protecting you, please. It’s built so firmly on the bones of good people. It deserves better than the Rogue’s cowardly ire.”

Silence followed. George was watching Savigny. Constant switched his attention from each of them. The dogs kept growling at the stranger, Earnest almost vengeful. And Sav …

Sav was looking at Nonsense like he was fighting a battle in himself none of them could see.

A deep, horrible fear struck Constant then. He didn’t know where it had come from, but he thought it had dredged up from somewhere in the delirium of his passing fever. A half-remembered horror, some deadly premonition he’d brushed against as he’d flirted with his grave. And he knew, oh he knew, that if Savigny walked out into the night, he might not return.

“Sav,” he choked, “don’t go. Please.”

But Sav didn’t even look at him, and his expression had settled into something alien, as though he was wearing the face of Constant’s brother over the skull of someone else. He even stood differently, his grip too loose on the sword, his stance settling strangely.

And he said, his voice low, “I must. Nonsense, first – what did you give Numair? Tell me now and I may be lenient when it comes time for you to face your crimes.”

“Just belladonna,” answered the stranger, Constant’s whole being shuddering as he realised this was the person who poisoned Numair. Why, then, _why_ was Savigny going with her? “A fright, I promise. Just a fright.”

“Belladonna isn’t a fright,” Sav answered icily. “It kills.”

“It didn’t, though,” replied Nonny. “It didn’t. Just a fright for the sticky nosy mage who wants to take Gallans from Galla, I promise. Belladonna doesn’t linger, does it? He walks again, like Remy won’t, like all of Raven’s chickees won’t. Look, see.” She held up her hand, calling a green light about her fingers. “Truth, see. I say, I did not intend for the mage, Numair Salmalín, to die of the belladonna tea.”

The fire remained green, Savigny’s own magic touching it briefly in a flare of pink.

“Truth,” murmured George, though reluctantly.

“And the rest?” Savigny asked him. “Is the rest truth too?”

George examined the stranger, saying, “It’s hard to tell. Nonsense has always evaded my Sight, which is suspicious enough. My feeling is as Constant’s. Don’t follow her. She doesn’t mean you well.”

“How little you know,” sneered Nonny hatefully.

Savigny sighed. He turned, setting the sword aside on a table. And then he turned back to Nonsense.

“Fine,” he said quietly. “I follow you one last time, but not for you. Remy has been nothing but loyal to me. You … you’ll face my displeasure yet.”

“Sav,” breathed Constant, stricken. George didn’t look happy either.

“Duty summons, Constant,” was Sav’s quiet response. “You understand, I know you do. You taught me how strong duty can be.” And he turned back a soft smile to his brother, who couldn’t return it through the surety of disaster looming over them. “We’ll speak when I come home, I promise. I … I think it’s time I told you some things.”

Constant said nothing. He couldn’t. Not even when George muttered a cuss word to himself and sheathed his knives, declaring that he was going too.

“Numair wouldn’t forgive me if I let you vanish into the winter,” was his taut response. “Should I fetch him?”

Sav hesitated. “No,” he said finally. “Don’t tell Numair, or Daine. They’ll worry too much, or try to follow, and Numair’s not strong enough. Constant? Are you mad at me?”

Constant looked at his brother, at his crooked smile, his green eyes, his careful curls. He loved him so much; he was so scared for him.

“No,” he said honestly. “Take a scarf? It’s cold.”

Savigny laughed, grabbing for the closest – Numair’s, which Sav had made him – and wrapping it around his throat.

And then he was gone.

Constant didn’t know how long he sat there watching the snow outside the window, his breath somewhere between his lungs and his brother. He didn’t think he’d breathe properly until Savigny was back, even if his return meant they were going to speak of things Constant wasn’t sure their relationship would survive. He’d gotten the feeling, from the stranger, to George’s reactions, to all the coded nightmares in their conversation, that he was about to see all the most gory parts of his brother’s shadowed life. He only hoped he’d grown up enough in the last year to be able to make sense of them.

But no, he decided. He wasn’t a child anymore. He wasn’t the boy who’d pestered his brother to heal a hawk he’d found in a wall, the boy who’d kept rocks against his door to stop them closing and who cried with panic at the thought of people leaving. He was a lord. He was responsible for all of Hartholm. He was the king’s closest advisor and engaged to marry Lady Eloise de Silvain. He was powerful, he was older, and he wouldn’t sit here and fret about something he had no control over.

The door banged open, Constant twitching with shock. He turned, sluggishly, only to feel all those terrible feelings of panic come straight back to haunt him. It was Daine. She was white.

“Numair’s collapsed,” she said.

They’d gotten Numair to a chair, but that was as far as they’d managed. He was simply to ungainly, and a dead weight right now even though he was, as far as Constant could tell, entirely conscious.

Ritsuko undid his shirt with shaking fingers, barely aware herself. They’d dragged her from an exhausted sleep and she wasn’t functioning well, her partner – and, Constant suspected, having seen them exchange kisses in the shadows, her lover – Beka lingering anxiously behind her. Numair’s chest was revealed, splotched with a strange patchy rash. She frowned at it, feeling the heat with her hand.

“Where’s it feel worst?” she asked him brusquely.

Numair struggled to talk. His mouth had slipped out of shape, as though the muscles weren’t holding it properly. Constant was horrified at how this distorted the shape of his face, those lovely eyes now misshapen as the skin sagged around them. “Ankle,” he wheezed, a cold clammy sweat coating him. “I can’t hold my head up.”

Ritsuko crouched, using her knife on his pant leg. “Hold your arm up,” she ordered him.

He tried. He did. But his arm slumped back down and he moaned, expression glazed.

Daine’s hand bit into Constant’s, trembling with fear. “What is this?” she breathed. They were in the kitchen. The staff were all watching, horrified. A door opened, Pech stumbling in half dressed, his box hanging from one hand. He blanched when he saw Numair’s face.

“Paralysis?” he asked, recovering fast. “Numair, can you move your legs?”

Numair did so.

“Partial paralysis?” said Pech to himself, frowning. “I can’t think of a – what is _that?”_

Constant peered, horror catching him as he saw what Ritsuko had found on Numair’s leg, where a scratch in his leg had ulcerated horrible. The rash was leeching up from it, and Ritsuko touched it and closed her eyes, expression going so grim Constant thought he might throw up.

“Progressive paralysis,” she corrected Pech, withdrawing her hand. “I need a knife. I can’t burn this out, I don’t have the strength, so I have to remove the poisoned flesh.”

Numair whimpered; Constant didn’t blame him.

“What is it?” Pech asked, going green at the idea. “I still don’t know what poi –”

“It’s not a poison,” said Ritsuko with garish finality. “It’s a spore, from soured meat or raw honey. I don’t know how it got into you, but it has. It attacks the nerves, killing them where it strikes and progressively paralysing the victim, until it reaches the nerves that power the breathing system. Then you die.”

“Oh,” said Numair into the quiet that followed. “Oh dear. Where’s Savigny?”

Constant swallowed hoarsely. “He had to go somewhere,” he whispered, seeing Daine stare at him, fury in her eyes, and the terrible fear in Numair’s. “He’ll be back soon.”

“Figures,” Numair managed with a thin smile that should have been reassuring but was instead horrible, “he never says goodbye, that ass.”

“Now,” said Ritsuko horribly, “a knife.”

It was then that Bon Bon lifted her head and snarled. Earnest followed two seconds later. And Daine lurched up, spinning to the door, and she cried something that Constant didn’t catch –

The door slammed open and the soldiers in nondescript uniforms burst in, more than any of them had a hope of standing up against. They slammed against them in a wave of violent confusion, people screaming, dogs barking, pain and fear and Constant was screaming too even as he saw them hit Ritsuko and go for Numair, and Rum diving them.

– until he was on the ground with his hands tied behind his back, screaming as he saw the soldiers fighting off his dogs, fighting off Rum, did Constant register what Daine had screamed:

“They’re coming.”

The soldiers took the clothes of almost everyone. No one could go for help without clothes. All of the survivors of the avalanche left naked and scared and bound tightly. They beat them too, if any protested. Even if they were already weak. Especially if they weren’t.

Numair wasn’t a danger to them, not in his state. He couldn’t use his Gift, they’d realised quickly, not as sick as he was. But they’d beat him anyway, and then they’d beat Daine for fighting for him, and Constant had only avoided the same fate because he’d heard Numair shout, “Don’t let them see!” to Daine and realised that he meant her magic. She had to hide her magic; they’d hurt her bad if they thought she had magic, just like they did Numair, just like they did Elspeth, just like they did Ritsuko.

They kept Numair’s clothes on him, which was alarming. Constant’s too. And Daine’s.

Constant wished it was more comforting than it was.

He didn’t recognise the soldiers, and he was trying desperately. With Numair unconscious and everyone else naked and chained in the icy wine cellars – they’ll _die_ , Constant had screamed, it was too cold! – it was up to Daine and Constant to think their way out of this. Constant couldn’t think about Elspeth shielding the unconscious Pech with her body, or how he’d surrendered until he’d seen them hitting his aunt. About how he’d tried to fight them off her and they’d hit him with the batons they were carrying and just kept hitting, even as Elspeth howled at them to stop. Constant also couldn’t think of his dogs, who’d fought viciously, and who he’d heard yelping as those boots and swords had turned on them, because if he thought of them he’d lose his mind. He didn’t know where Rum was. He hadn’t seen if his dogs were dead. He couldn’t think of how shallowly Numair was breathing as they chained his limp hands together, or the chains they put to latch Constant to Daine, or of Sav coming home and not realising something terrible had happened and walking right into a trap.

He couldn’t think. He just obeyed because if he obeyed, he’d live, and if he lived he could get them out of here. Him, Numair, his dogs, Pech, Elspeth, Daine – everyone.

They’d be okay, if only he obeyed, and he paid attention, and he was cleverer than he’d ever been.

I fought winter, he thought when they finished doing whatever terrible things they’d been doing down in the cellars to the rest of the captives – Daine, Constant, and Numair chained upstairs – and if I can fight winter, I can fight soldiers.

“The king will destroy you for this,” Daine hissed at them when the soldiers came to haul them up by their chains. They dragged them, forcing Daine and Constant to stumble together to not be hauled over, but Numair they just picked up and carried like he was a sack of trash to them.

One of them laughed. Constant hated him like he’d never hated anyone before, not even Cole.

“Bold to think you still have a king,” said the soldier.

Constant went a little bit away in his head then. Through his shock, he knew they were walking. He felt the shock of the outside cold. Then he knew they were descending, lifting his attention just enough to realise they were being led down into the void that had been left when the other wing had collapsed. Numair and Sav had illusioned it, but Constant knew it was there because Rum had showed him. And now they were going down into it, into the dark, and there was no Rum, no Bon Bon, no Earnest, no hope.

“Bon Bon’s going for help,” Daine whispered to him before they stepped into the quiet of the tunnels, while there was still a chance the wind would obscure her words. “I don’t believe they’ve breeched the palace.”

So Bon Bon was alive.

Constant didn’t think about Earnest, his puppy, his silly, loving boy. The pup who’d, the day that Daine had explained to the dogs what ‘love’ meant, gone around to everyone, laying his head in their laps and gazing up to them while thinking, ‘I love you’ loudly at them as Daine wept from laughing. The puppy who’d grown beside Constant this past year, who was barely a year old, who loved his balls and being hugged and who loved the snow and who loved Constant like no one had loved him before.

Daine’s hand crept into his and held him tight. He realised he was crying for Earnest when he didn’t know if Pech or Ritsuko or Elspeth or any of their staff were still alive. And he was so sorry that he cried for his hound, but he suspected the rest of his grief was too big for him to handle right now.

Step by step, he stumbled into the dark, clinging to Daine’s hand like it was the only way he’d keep breathing. Listening to her jagged breaths, her soft sobs. Her fear and her bravery. Thinking of nothing but trying to remember what ways they were turning; what way they could escape. Don was alive. He must be.

Step after step.

Don was alive. Earnest was alive. This was a trick. Numair was fine. They’d find a healer, somehow. Savigny was alive.

Step after step.

Daine was dragging him now, he’d slowed. He was so tired. How long had they been walking? He realised now that he was bleeding, touching his stomach and feeling the cold wet. He was dizzy. He stumbled and Daine snarled with rage as someone kicked him.

“Don’t,” Constant managed, trying to get up. But it wasn’t so far past his illness; he was so weary. “Don’t show them.”

“What’s he saying?” came a soldier’s horrible voice.

“Nothing,” Daine panted. “He’s sick. You need to let him rest.”

But there was no rest.

They let Daine support him as they stumbled on. She stunk of sweat and blood and fear. Her heart was banging so hard he could feel it through his side. And he closed his eyes and drifted into the place he went when he mediated, desperate to keep going, step by step, by step, by step, just like breathing …

_… She wheeled as she felt her boy join her, his soul weary beyond belief. Rage! She felt rage, that they’d taken her chick below the ground, where he couldn’t see the sky. They were taking him from her and she wanted to dive and rip and bite and feast on their soft wet innards, wheeling again with the thick scent of smoke driving her wild._

_Her chick was thinking of his nest-brothers. She didn’t know where the dark one was, but she knew where to find the pale brother. The one with the gentle hands. He was below, in the burning nest, with his mate and other-egg-chick._

_Do you want him? she asked the sorrowful soul of her chick, who drifted with her because his body was below the ground, where he couldn’t stand to be. I’ll take you to him_

_And she circled down to the burning nest that she’d escaped._

_The god-bird was there, clanging wildly. Furious that they’d taken the chick away from him when he’d been so close. She commiserated, screaming her own rage and promising him a feast of their enemies to avenge their hurt, before they’d fly to find their lost chick._

_Pippy, she felt her chick calling. Pippy, help me._

_Find his nest-brother, she urged the god-bird._

_The pale king? asked the god-bird. This way._

_Together they flew, over the dead, over the dying, until they were circling the palace looking for a way in. There were plenty. Doors gaped open, broken windows. Their hearing was astute. They found the chick’s brother by his roars. And they swept in a window into madness, seeing two-leg striking two-leg, blood and mayhem; across a room of glorious battle as the chick howled with sorrow in her mind. She told him not to worry; sometimes there was battle but at the end, a feast! They would survive. They were powerful._

_King-brother, said the god-bird, turning on his glittery wings. She saw where he was angling, finding the pale man with a blooded silver blade, his mate by his side with a great long stick in her hands. They fought in unison, a blooded pair. She screeched her approval, as did the god-bird, as did her chick in her mind, her Constant-boy._

_Battle! screamed the god-bird proudly, lashing out as he dived and killing a soldier who lashed at the king with a blow of his silvered claws to the man’s eyes. Pippy dived too, striking, biting, lashing, screaming, rage! Rage and glory and blood!_

_And then a man appeared, tall and thin, spiteful. Like a hawk, but sallow. Dark skinned as the other egg-brother was dark-skinned, but crueller. Not a hawk, Pippy realised. An egg stealer. A snake._

_A mage._

_He used his two-leg magic to strike down the king-brother, who cried out with pain. His mate screamed with anger, throwing himself at the snake-man, who struck her with his magic too. It was a horrible magic. Pippy hated him. How dare he!_

_She dived for the snake. Kill the snake, save the nest. For her boy!_

_And the snake responded with flames just as her claws hooked him in the face, tearing into his featherless skin –_

Constant screamed, flames licking his feathers, his beak gaping. He screamed and he screamed until the boots came again and again and again, Daine howling with a voice like a wolf and distantly – through the flames – he realised he needed to stop screaming or she was going to shapeshift and become a wolf, a wolf against all those swords. They’d cut her to pieces.

He swallowed his screams and turned it into a thin wail instead, then silence. Just his bubbling breath and his horror and everything his seen boiling in his brain. The burning mews and Rum with his talons in a man’s eyes and Ozorne striking Don down, striking Nora. He couldn’t speak; his voice was somewhere back in the flames with Pippy.

“Don’t, don’t, don’t,” someone was begging. He was, he realised. Maybe he did still have a voice, and he was begging Daine not to shapeshift, not to die. Even as he realised the soldiers would think he was begging for mercy. But he was a wing-brother; he wouldn’t surrender. Hawks didn’t know the meaning of the word.

Daine was still holding his hand and her nails had turned to claws, which cut him.

They were dragged onwards, into the bowels of the earth, in the darkness, and the heat. The heat? It was hot down here, he realised. It stunk of rot, of animal. Of sickness and flesh boiling. And the darkness was giving way to a stringy, pallid light. He squinted against it, aghast, and so he had his eyes open when they pulled him out of the shadows and deposited him, bleeding and gruesome, on the dirt. They were still underground, but this cavern was huge. It towered so high that he couldn’t see the ceiling for the darkness up there. One wall was polished rock of a black so dark it seemed to swallow night. He didn’t know where the light was coming from. And the clanging was back in his head, the dizziness, maybe it had been all along? But now so fierce he was sick with it, rolling over him, pain, pain, pain – pain that wasn’t his, grief that wasn’t his, he loathed the chains and the dark and he loathed the _men_ , oh how he’d feast on them as soon as he was free, and he writhed up and snarled –

Constant’s gaze met that of the beast.

He froze, shaken back into his own mind. Everything else fell away, his fear. The attack on the estate and the palace. The fates of everyone except Daine, who was rigid with shock, and Numair, who was either still unconscious or unable to indicate otherwise. Nothing mattered except the huge eyes that watched Constant watch them back.

A dragon.

There was a dragon under the earth.

Constant felt Daine press back into him so hard that he gripped her close, holding her like if he let go she’d slip away into the night. They stared at the dragon, who was beautiful, and terrible, and chained. At her sickly grey scales and her dull eyes. At the chains that held her, bolted into her very flesh. She was muzzled like a dog and her feet lashed together with heavy mage-iron sick with spells. There were raw patches of flesh all over her body where the chains had rubbed away her scales. Her stomach was distended, the floor below her bloodied, and she breathed like a broken bellows.

 _“Little bird,”_ said the dragon, staring deep into Constant’s soul. _“How they’ve snapped your little wings. Just like my baby, who they murdered.”_

She raised her glorious head and keened, Constant and Daine both covering their ears with twin cries of horror. Daine seemed worse than Constant, writhing in her chains and screaming too, like the dragon was tearing her open with her grief. And then, as it built to a terrible crescendo, when it felt like all the air in the great room was being sucked into the dragon’s sadness, suddenly something gave. There was a feeling of magic, of something being pulled from one place to another, violently, needfully.

And Daine collapsed without another sound, eyes closed and chest barely moving. Just like Numair.

He was truly, now, alone.

Constant lost his mind. He was certain they’d killed her and he railed against it, fighting his chains, fighting her limp hand in his, fighting to be free. The dragon was silent now, staring at them with her eyes wide as though with shock. The soldiers fought him back, but they didn’t beat him now and he spared a thought to wonder why – until he realised there were others there, other humans in robes. Mages. Why were there mages here?

“Don’t hurt that one,” said one of the mages, pointing to him. Constant spat at him, livid with rage. “Disgusting. Despite that filth, he’s not to be harmed. If he’s killed, we don’t control his brother.”

“This one?” one of soldiers asked, dragging Numair upright. Constant couldn’t see his face. He prayed he was alive. “What of him? I heard he’s a fierce mage.”

“Not right now he isn’t,” said the first mage who’d spoken, Constant memorising his face. He’d have his revenge, he was certain. “And he won’t be for some time. There’s plans for him, back home. Take him through and keep him chained until they get him under the wood. He won’t make a peep then, even if they heal what the assassin infected him with.”

Constant looked at Daine, as did the other soldiers, but no one had to say anything.

“That one,” said the mage, “is leverage. The boy and the mage will obey if you have her. But if they don’t obey …”

He left that there.

Constant had shot through rage and shock and right into a brilliant, dazzling calm. Fighting would get them killed. Screaming did nothing. He watched silently as the mages did something that was awful beyond description, the spelled chains on the dragon and their own Gifts combining to pull magic right out of her and into that polished wall, which began to glow softly. The dragon groaned but didn’t roar again, which Constant’s aching ears were glad for.

No fighting. No screaming. No running away. That would get Daine, or Numair, or Savigny killed. He had to be smart. Daine and Numair needed him to be smart.

 _“Are you going to give up?”_ the dragon asked him, her voice so loud he felt like his brain was melting.

 _“No,”_ he thought back, stunned when she curled her lip like she understood. There was a thoughtfulness to her now that hadn’t been there before, a surprise. And she kept looking at Daine. _“I don’t give up. I don’t ever give up.”_

 _“Good.”_ She sighed, sorrowfully, as the soldiers hauled Constant up and began to drag him to the wall. A portal, he realised. It was a magical gap in the world. The gods only knew where he’d end up when he was hauled through. _“Maybe you’ll see your home again yet, little hawk. If only life could be so kind to me. I’ll die here, in this hole.”_

Constant didn’t have time to answer her. He’d been picked up and carried through, his last glimpse of the cavern – of Galla, of his _home_ – being the dragon’s glittering eyes. The last thing he heard her parting words:

_“Be strong.”_

And then he was gone, further away from home than he’d ever been and with no idea of how he’d get back.


	44. Under the Earth

Something was happening that she hadn’t expected to ever occur. A ripple within her; a pressure of something fighting to be without. She was glad to be alone, in the dark, for this. Even if the chains didn’t let her swing her head around to scent what was happening, to make sure all was happening as it should – she was glad to be alone.

Her rage burned hotter than the suns of all the realms combined. How _dare_ these mortals rip her from her home and submerge her into this stinking earth, chaining her with iron and spells? How dare they rope her strength into their sacrilegious stone, forcing it to consume her to survive? She could smell the stink of the other beings they’d tried before her, smell their deaths seeping into the sand below her talons. A small glint of pride flickered at the knowledge that only she, one of dragonkind, the most _supreme_ magic user, had been able to power their working, but it was just a glint. Devoured by rage. 

She turned her attention back to what the girl two-legger had done to her, the screaming one they’d dragged in here chained just like she was. The one who had brimmed with the magic of beasts, her companion chained beside her glittering dully in comparison. She didn’t know what had happened, only that that beast magic had leapt from the girl to the death deep within her womb, and now … now there was life.

She focused.

Rage would come later.

There was no breaking out of the chains. For a being who had never been contained by time before, contained was now all she was. They came down into the dark, with their whips, with their spells. They took away the baby who had died in the womb but been born alive, somehow. Alive enough to know that this darkness wasn’t her home, her soft calls breaking every inch of her mother’s great heart. There was no hiding her, not here. Not with her mother chained.

So they took her away and left her mother grieving.

Grief, in a dragon, was simply another subset of rage.

And time passed.

They’d pulled her into their world. Opened their portal with her, marching rows, tens, thousands, all of the men in this realm past her. Stinking with their iron and their armour. Used her to whisk away the chained ones, the hawk boy and the dying mage and the girl-who-saved-the-baby. Then they took that baby, the miracle Skysong – named for the skies she deserved to be born under but hadn’t been – and they left her mother alone. And alone she was, for so long. In the dark.

Under the earth.

One day, the mage came. The desert-man, the baby stealer. He lit the cavern up with his pathetic human magic, blinding her. She did nothing, too tired. Weary and soul-sore and heartsick. But she watched him, _oh_ , she watched him, the baby stealer – knowing that one day she would crunch him to ashes in her mouth in front of his screaming stinking human army. She loathed every human; she would see them all dead before she was done. Even if she had to die to do so, forcing herself back into this realm as an undead corpse bent on revenge. She knew she’d do it. Penance for Skysong and her lost mother.

The baby stealer brought a man with him, a man who was chained in his soul if not in his body. He was a sickly human, thin and prey-smelling. He watched her like she was glorious even though she was rotting in the earth. She’d crunch him too and snarled at him to say so; he didn’t even flinch.

Fascinated, she ignored the barbed words they were exchanging and lifted the uppermost thoughts on the soul-chained-man’s mind. He thought of grim things, blood and grief and fear. Things she had no care for. Humans should think of blood and grief; if she had her way, that’s all they’d think of.

But …

He also thought of his Skysongs, his babies. One in the womb, one born; both who’d been taken from him. He was thinking of his daughter in the baby-stealer’s arms and his mate forced to dine at the baby stealer’s side while he was kept in chains, out of sight. A king, she realised. A cowed king, kept hidden, so that his people feared for his death. But he wasn’t dead. He was, like her, buried under the earth.

She also felt this: despite this man’s worries for his stolen babies and his endangered mate, he looked at her and he felt sorrow. He felt grief for her, and rage for her that matched her own as much as a human’s could, and he burned as though if he could he’d smash her chains and see her fly free. She touched his mind and knew this as she knew herself. He was, she thought dully, kin to her heart in this. A father without a baby as she was a mother without hers, lingering on in the relentless hope of seeing them again.

But when he looked her in the eyes, she looked away. Kin or not, he was a human. And every human must die.

She vowed it.

**END OF PART II**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> END OF PART 2 WOW which means hiatus time for me again so I can go back and edit all the typos out and iron out my plans for part 3. What a RIDE this has turned out to be. SEE YOU ALL IN A MONTH OR SO WITH THE NEXT PART.


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